It’s the latest social media craze that’s getting marketers excited – Vine, the 6-second video app. It’s done for video what Instagram did for photos, and like Instagram it has been bought by one of the biggest players in social – Twitter.

What we find absolutely brilliant about Vine (and similar apps) is that is gives marketers with limited budget and technical skill the chance to do something creative.

What you don’t need:

A massive marketing budget, full camera crew, expensive video editing software, the technical skill to operate camera equipment and software

What you do need:

A great idea, an iPhone or iPad (Vine isn’t on Android yet, but there are plenty of alternatives!)

You also need to be clued up on social media! Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as just posting some videos and watching the money roll in. Our social media courses will help you market your brand through social channels using tools such as Vine. Combined with content marketing training you will be ready to make the most of social video.

You may think that 6 seconds is restricting, but that restriction forces you to think – What can I fit in 6 seconds? Think of it as the video version of an elevator pitch.

A 6 second video is a viable way of getting your message across in today’s crowded social networks. It’s easier to convince a passer by to stop for 6 seconds than for 6 minutes. Read the rest of "Getting Creative with Video Marketing on Vine"

Posted by Craig Charley in Blogging & Content Marketing, Mobile, News, Social Media on April 26th, 2013| No Comments »

In 2013, most businesses realise the importance of content. That’s why so many SEO agencies are repositioning themselves as content agencies, or at least offering it as a primary product. Our Content Marketing courses used to attract mainly bloggers, but since the Panda and Penguin Google updates we have seen a large increase in SEOs wanting to learn about content.

Yet this mass conversion to content brings up some issues – there is too much noise. Most businesses are still stuck in an outdated content strategy – regular, mediocre quality blog posts with little intent. The content is happening, but is it working?

With content at the forefront of so many marketing strategies, it seems at first glance that big businesses have a massive advantage. Whole in-house marketing teams as well as high profile agencies on hand to craft incredible content. How does a small business compete against this with a 1-3 person marketing team?

Big Evergreen Content

The idea for this post was sparked by Hannah Smith‘s talk at BrightonSEO ‘Go Big or Go Home’ (excellent write up on State of Search), which prompted me to revisit Dr. Pete’s SEOmoz post at the end of last year ‘Why Big Content Is Worth the Risk’. Both Hannah and Dr. Pete explain why big content is necessary and how it can help your business stand out in a very crowded world of below par blog posts:

“We all want the low-hanging fruit, but let’s be honest – the low-hanging fruit is rotten, bruised, and covered with the grubby fingerprints of all the other spoiled brats pawing at it.”

The consensus of both the talk and the post is that big content takes around 40 hours to produce. Hannah compared this to an average 12 hours for ‘small content’ but I think that’s a huge overestimation for the majority of businesses. James Carson recently alerted Twitter to the existence of a job ad for an agency looking for a Marketing Executive who for £18,000 a year had to write 25 blog posts a day. That’s well over 6,000 articles a year on a range of topics, written by somebody with little knowledge about the subject and obviously no research.

With that much noise, it’s important to be different to break through, and that’s where big content comes in. But I’m going to go a step further and ask you to consider another element - sustainability. Another popular topic at BrightonSEO, and a common phrase in marketing blogs at the moment is Evergreen Content.

In the rest of this post I’m going to try and convince you why your content should be both big and evergreen for the holy grail of content marketing.

Read the rest of "Big Wins that Last – Why Big Evergreen Content is the Best Content Strategy"

Posted by Craig Charley in Blogging & Content Marketing, News, SEO, Social Media on April 22nd, 2013| No Comments »

Much has been said about the usefulness of Social Media within Project Management, but a topic that as yet seems to have been left untouched is how Project Management can help in Social Media Marketing campaigns.

Many of the principles and techniques that we teach in our Project Management Training, as well as on our PRINCE2 Course, can be applied to Social Marketing campaigns in order to improve their effectiveness and efficiency.

In this post we’ll be taking a look at some and how they should be enacted.

Initiating a Project

The ‘Initiating a Project‘ stage of PRINCE2 can certainly be applied to a Social Media campaign. This process effectively outlines the reasons for and initial format of a project.

With regard to a Social Media campaign, it would require an understanding of the goals you hope to achieve by engaging on this platform.

It would also set out the preliminary ideas as to how to go about enacting this, both from a strategic point of view (what sort of things will you post, who are you targeting) and from a logistical perspective (which networks will you use and how much.)

Read the rest of "How to Use Project Management to Run Better Social Media Campaigns"

Posted by Andy Trainer in News, Project Management, Social Media on April 8th, 2013| 2 Comments »

The latest news out of Facebook HQ (it seems like there’s something new every week at the moment!) is that the social giant is considering trialling the use of hashtags, the now ubiquitous topic grouping symbol popularised by rival Twitter.

If Facebook does go ahead with the idea, rumoured to be intended to work alongside the new graph search feature to make topics and conversations easier to find, it will join Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and its own sepia-soaked photosharer Instagram as a user of the device.

Bearing all that in mind, we thought it would be worth having a refresher in how best to use hashtags for marketing on all the major platforms. Of course to really get to grips with marketing on Twitter, Facebook and the like, our Social Media Workshop is ideal.

If you want to see hashtags in action, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.

So how do we go about using hashtags for marketing? Well firstly we need to distinguish between two different ways they are used by businesses across social media:

1/ Using Existing Hashtags

One very simple and popular way to use hashtags for marketing businesses is to find trending hashtags related to your specific niche and use them in your posts.

If for example you write about Project Management, you could use the hashtags #pm #pmot to open up your posts to a wider audience who may be searching for content placed under that grouping.

Going down this route is generally seen to be the ‘safest’ option when using hashtags but you still need to be careful.

Read the rest of "Marketing With #Hashtags"

Posted by Jackson Rawlings in Marketing, News, Social Media on March 20th, 2013| 4 Comments »

More big news from Facebook HQ yesterday, coming just months after the announcement of the new Graph Search feature.

In order to provide a less cluttered and more organised user experience, Facebook will soon be rolling out a completely redesigned News Feed.

Initial promotional screenshots are quite revealing and give a clear indication as to the direction the company is taking. It’s obvious that the redesign has been made with the Graph Search in mind and so these two changes together signal one of the bigger shifts in the company’s history.

Luckily here at Silicon Beach, our 2-day Social Media Course is always up to date, so you’ll have no worries about getting left behind by these changes.

But what exactly is changing?

“Personalized Newspaper”

This is how Zuckerberg has described the intention behind the changes. Some are questioning the comparison but what is clear is that the redesign will bring about a more structured, delineated experience.

Read the rest of "Getting to Grips With Facebook’s News Feed Redesign"

Posted by Aaron Charlie in News, Social Media on March 8th, 2013| No Comments »

This competition is now closed – check back very soon for our next one!

Win an amazing print from Silicon Beach Training director and esteemed Brighton photographer Heather Buckley worth over £50!

With just a tweet or share, you can win a great new piece of art for your wall at home or work!

The choice is yours! You can pick from any of Heather’s prints on RedBubble, and even whether you want it mounted or on canvas.

This is the first of our new monthly social media promotions. Keep your eyes peeled at the beginning of each month for a brand new competition with another amazing prize up for grabs.

How to Enter

There are 3 ways to enter and each one gives you another chance of winning:

1/ Retweet this tweet

2/ Share this post on Facebook

3/ Share this post on Google+

Remember that you must have liked us on Facebook, circled us on Google+ and followed us on Twitter to be eligible for the prize.

It’s as simple as that!

The Prize

We have a fantastic prize on offer this month – a large Heather Buckley print of your choice either mounted or on canvas: it’s up to you!

Read the rest of "Closed! Win a Heather Buckley Print"

Posted by Aaron Charlie in Competitions, News on March 1st, 2013| 2 Comments »

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has been in the news a lot recently. Firstly he has a new book coming out, “The Digital Age”, from which The Wall Street Journal “leaked” the following quote:

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

Secondly, he’s announced that he is about to sell 42% of his Google stock (worth more than $2.5 billion).

As with any story about Google, the conspiracy theorists have come out in force to guess at what these two moves mean.

Marketing blog The Drum claimed that Schmidt’s verification quote is ‘confirmation’ that Google+ is to become a ‘search priority’ in future and that this is part of Google’s on-going battle with other social networks.

They’ve made the assumption that what Schmidt calls verification is the same as Google verification. With Google products you can verify yourself as an author, a publisher, a business, a place.

It didn’t take long for certain SEO blog commenters to connect this to Schmidt’s stock sale, believing that the move towards ‘Google verification’ will force businesses to buy more ads, increasing the value of said stock.

Of course, as SEOs it is always important to listen to Google employees, especially those at the top. As one of the top dogs at Google, Schmidt’s personal views are always going to trickle down to those below him. The first piece of advice on our SEO courses is to go and read everything that Google has published about SEO!

But does Schmidt mean Google+ when he uses the term ‘verified’? Read the rest of "Eric Schmidt, Verification, Google+ & a Storm in a Teacup"

Posted by Craig Charley in News, SEO on February 13th, 2013| No Comments »

You will have heard the recent news about the closure of big names on the UK High Street, including HMV, Blockbusters and Jessops.

Shops are dying. Advertising is dying. Newspapers are dying. Email is dying. Landlines are dying. Cinema is dying. Greeting cards are dying.

Technology is taking over and businesses are beginning to realise that they need to embrace it or get left behind.

Most people who attend our social media course have a business that is trying to sell a product or a service.

Until the beginning of 2009, social media wasn’t really on the radar for businesses. Now, it’s a mainstream channel of communication for all of us who want to market something. It’s essential to keep up-to-date with the trends, opportunities and risks.

Even the internet as a whole has only been used (well) as a marketing and selling platform for the last 15 years or so. You can learn how to use it to your advantage with our Internet Marketing Training Courses.

Together, the internet and social media will continue to shape the world around us, so let’s take a look at what changes they’re bringing about.

RIP Shops

These days, people go to a store to view the goods they might want to buy, then use their smartphone to shop around for the best price and buy online.

Customers are not stupid. Rather than mourn the demise of the High Street store, remember, there was a time not so long ago when there were no shops – people used to wheel their wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow shouting ‘cockles and mussels’ etc. In some parts of the world, that’s still the case!

If they want to survive, today’s shops need to be more creative with the experience they offer the customer. And they certainly need to get on board with ecommerce. Amazon and eBay are taking over the retail world!

Read the rest of "Tech Trends Your Business Needs to Know"

Posted by Jackie in Marketing, News, Social Media on February 5th, 2013| No Comments »