To get the best out of social media takes planning. Have I drummed that into you enough yet?! Once you know what you want and you’ve figured out a way to get there – you are on your way! All you have to do is to produce valuable content and information that people will find useful, unique and unrivalled. Ahem. Now if you are a pub, bar or restaurant, using social media is vital. But you are up against a lot of competition. You also don’t have a lot of time, being very busy

I regret that I have had to pull down the last post, due to some silly bird thinking I have stole her content. Please! This was not true. Have I come across her page before? Possibly. I read mountains of blogs, ALL THE TIME. Do I bookmark everything I read? No. Although I probably should. Did I copy her post? NO. Did I offer her a link to her website? (which is rather good). Yes – 2 in fact! Did I offer to publish her content on my pages? Yes. One can try. This is by no mean

We’ve posted about Twitter many a time on Online PR UK but the questions I receive are all the same. Are you one of those people that open Twitter in the morning to see if you’ve had any mentions, RTs etc RT a couple of tweets yourself and post up your own PR tweet of the day? Thought so. Stop. Lets think like England did in the EURO2012 against Italy. (Kind of). GOALS GOALS GOALS. What do you want out of this? what does your business need? Increase sales? Increase subscriber

We all know we have to, but how do we start? Well this post is designed to help you do just that! 1. Understand your own site before you do ANYTHING. Why would somebody want to link to your site? 2. Find out who is already linking to you, if anyone. Go to Google and type in link:domainname.com and then research these guys. Who else do they link to? (Your competition) and what keywords, anchor texts do they use? 3. Now figure out your strategy:. Find out who is linking to yo

Here is OPTs 10 great tips and strategies to make Pinterest work for your business, brand or product: 1. Install the “Pin it” bookmark to your browser Adding the “pin it” bookmark to your bookmark bar is easy to do,visit: http://www.pinterest.com/about/goodies . When you pin a webpage, using the pin-it bookmark, it will show you all of the pictures associated with that page. Then, you can choose the picture you’d most like to pin. Easy! 2. Use Keywords, Hashtags and @replys

OPT introduces: Yvonne Morris a Commercial Law Consultant. We think that as well as knowing how to use your website as a marketing tool, you should also be aware of the legalities centred around actually having one! Over the next three days, Yvonne explains to us all about Cookies and the law. This information is vital to all who own a website, or who is thinking of getting one! Over to Yvonne…. WHY HAS THE LAW CHANGED? The 2002 European Directive upon which the 2003 UK P

What is HooSaid? “HooSaid is a social search engine that returns people instead of pages. Just type in a word, such as “food” to find real people related to that topic. Our algorithm examines people on social networks and objectively decides what it is they really talk about, not just something they said in the last 10 minutes. We like to call it Pagerank for People” Now the guys at Hoosaid say that not utilising the ‘real time’ template isn’t useful and I agree. There is no

Successful Viral Content is Easy! OPT gives you 10 reasons why viral marketing will work for your business, career or brand: If you write a passionate, eloquent, or well-researched argument that your niche will agree with, you will gain followers. Fact. There is already an army of people who agree with you so they are ready and waiting to jump in a say ‘AYE’! You could take the ‘stirring up’ angle and write a well-written piece in answer to another argument or challenge a po

After this Diamond Jubilee Long weekend, I have had a few thoughts over past posts and felt the need to remind everyone to stop using Twitter for Self Promotion! We are all guilty of it, yes, me too – but we (that will be the Royal we) must remind ourselves to use Twitter in the correct way. We know the importance of promoting your brand and awareness to your customers, friends and family; however, if it is pure promotion, then it would turn people off. People just don’t wan

OPT offers you top 5 tips that your competitors will already know! read on… It is fair to say that online pr is NOT the same as offline pr. The differences are significant. And it is important to learn that both are pitched differently. This is something successful marketeers have learnt over time and you can learn this from them. Online PR is a varied mixture of brand reputation monitoring and management activities and it’s main goal to influence media, communities and au

What marketing is your fellow industry colleagues using? Can you suggest tips for those behind you? Work out who your power players are. The big boys. The ones that you look up to, the next level. Follow them closely, observe what tricks they use in their marketing, use google alerts to track their progress over a period of time. Get involved with them, and support their goals and achievements. Become a giver and watch the kind of responses you get in return. Follow Online ma