I’ve found a great infographic from social media expert Dan Zarrella which summarises some studies he’s conducted on click through rates (CTRs) on Twitter links.

He’s given out some really valuable information which could help to improve your Twitter interaction rates so I thought it would be useful for everyone to have that info in text format rather than a screen consuming image!

There are results from quite a few different studies in here so I’ve just picked a few I think are the easiest to implement straight away:

Tweets between 120 and 130 characters have highest CTRs

Zarrella looked at over 200,000 Tweets containing links and found that the tweets with the highest CTRs were between 120 and 130 characters long, just shy of Twitters maximum 140 character limit.

I found this kind of surprising given the attention span of users on sites like Twitter – I figured the shorter the better but Tweets of this length could indicate that a link is more attractive when it’s accompanied by a short piece of text.

I’d guess that a comment or introduction to the link gives the impression that there actually is a human behind the Tweet and it’s not just a bot throwing out links.

Place links quarter way through your Tweet

In the same study Zarrella found that, out of the 200,000 Tweets, the highest CTRs could be found in the Tweets that presented the link around 25% of the way into the text.

So it if we make up a quick example (ignore the text, it might not make sense), Zarrella is saying that a Tweet formatted like this:

“Love this post [link link link]. Really informative article from @Serchen, everyone take a look.”

Would work better than a Tweet formatted like this:

“I’ve found a really informative article from @Serchen. Everyone take a look, I love this post [link link link].”

Mentioning other users and putting ‘RT’ gets a higher CTR

The result I found most interesting was how CTRs increased when Tweets contained certain words of phrases.

Tweets containing the terms ‘via’, ‘retweet’, ‘please’, and ‘check’ (as in ‘check this out’) had a higher CTR. As did Tweets containing mentions like @Serchen.

I made the assumption that Tweets that were essentially asking for Retweets (or begging for, if you’re cynical), would be perceived as slightly more spammy than those simply presenting information, but apparently not!

On a side note, I think the @mentions point is really important to implement because not only can mentioning other users instigate conversation, it can also add a little more personality to your Twitter and gain you more followers. (See more on Increasing your Twitter Followers).

(Note: Zarrella doesn’t specify which study this information came from, but if it was the 200,000 Tweets one then it’s a safe bet to say his results are pretty accurate.)

Schedule Tweets – CTRs higher on weekends

Another result that I found quite interesting is that Tweets posted over the weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) had a higher CTR than those posted throughout the week. It’s quite a significant rise too.

I figured most Twitter users would be using a mobile device of some sort and would have Twitter ‘on the go’ if you like. Either that, or those working on computers would be checking it throughout the day, but, again, apparently not! (This is why I love Zarrella’s studies).

I want to show you the graph as well so you can see just how significant the jump is for CTRs over the weekend:

This result is a good argument in favour of scheduling Tweets and using third party tools like TweetDeck or HootSuite. As long as you’ve got the content it only takes 2 minutes to schedule some Tweets so by the looks of things it’s definitely worth experimenting with.

Tweet in the afternoon – 3pm is good

If you are going to Tweet at the weekend, better make sure it’s after 2pm as CTRs seem to peak at 2pm, 5pm and 8pm. Unsurprisingly CTRs significantly dipped at 4am and 7am, but apart from that it looks like you could generally achieve a 0.5% CTR majority of the day.

There are a few more findings on the infographic but I thought these five would be the most useful, and like I said, the easiest to implement. You could even be really literal and write a Tweet 120 characters long, with a link 25% of the way through, ask for a Retweet and schedule it at 3pm on a Saturday. Let us know if you give any of these techniques a go!

If you want to see the full infographic you can find it here: http://danzarrella.com/infographic-how-to-get-more-clicks-on-twitter.html

We’ve already covered how you can use Pinterest.com as part of your online marketing strategy, so I thought it would be good progress to take that idea one step further and give you some tips on how you can connect Pinterest together with the rest of your social media accounts, as well as your website.

Although it might seem like a bit of a basic concept, if you’ve got a good grasp of what all the different settings do and how you can create appropriate links to your account then you’ll be able to asses which ones will benefit your social media and marketing efforts.

Connecting Pinterest.com with your Facebook Page

The biggest and easiest way to connect your Pinterest account and your Facebook account is to activate the ‘Add Pinterest to Facebook Timeline’ feature within the ‘Settings’ tab of your Pinterest profile.

Once activated, this feature will share any pinboards you follow/create, pinners you follow and most other activity on Facebook. However, there’s a slightly different way for you to share out your repins as this isn’t done automatically.

You’ll notice in your Settings that there’s another Facebook option called ‘Link to Facebook’, this actually does a couple of different things. The first thing it does is post a link to your connected Facebook account on your profile, the second thing it does is allow you to share repins quickly.

You can see from the picture that when you go to repin something you’re given the option to tick a box and share it to Facebook (and Twitter). You won’t get this option if you don’t link your accounts. It might not be auto-posting but it’s not exactly an inconvenience.

Connecting Pinterest.com with your Twitter Profile

The same option is also available to Twitter and is accessible in the same way. Activate the ‘Link to Twitter’ setting and you’ll get a link to your Twitter account on your profile as well as an option to share our individual repins from the repin screen (above).

Unfortunately, there’s not a way for you to Tweet out entire pinboards without just Tweeting out the link, but again, it’s not too much of an inconvenience to copy and paste the link if you’re happy to do it that way. You also don’t currently have the option to auto share your follows etc. as you can with Facebook’s ‘Add to Timeline’ option, however, I would image both of these will be options in the future.

Connecting Pinterest.com with your Website

There are a couple of different buttons you can use to connect your Pinterest.com account to your website, and even an image you can download for things like email signatures.

The ‘Follow Button’ works in a similar way to Twitter’s Follow button and subscribes users to your pins and pinboards. Once they’ve clicked the button they’ll see your pins on their homepage. Theres a few different types of button you can have as you can see from the picture and clicking on each one brings up its individual code. Pinterest.com says that they’ve been designed in those sizes to help webmasters incorporate them into headers and sidebars.

The ‘Pin It Button’ is a little more complicated as it allows you to specify a particular image on a page that you’d like to pin. You need to fill in the form in order to generate the code (I’ve filled in an example so you can see how it should look).

If you have multiple images on the page that you’d like to make pinnable there’s an advanced option which brings up a longer, more customisable bit of code. Although, webmasters/developers will probably step in at this point, so if you’re just the marketer or content manager then I’d guess it’s not your job to make sure this works.

The ‘Pinterest Logo’ is the final way for you to connect your website with your Pinterest.com account. There’s two different logo’s for you to choose from and the beauty of using an image is that you can link it to whichever part of your account you want.

Like I mentioned earlier, buttons are probably a better idea if you want to get followers but if you want to link to your account from your email signature or from a newsletter then using the logo and pointing it to your profile could work really well.

So those are the main ways you can connect your Pinterest.com account to your website and your social networks. If you want a little more detail on how you can use Pinterest.com for marketing check out our post: Using Pinterest.com as Part of Your Online Marketing Strategy.

Half of me didn’t think this post was really important enough to write, because who doesn’t know the benefits of having a calendar (for anything), right? But I started doing a little more research into how businesses were handling their content, which turned out to be not very well in many cases, and figured okay so maybe this kind of stuff isn’t as obvious to some people than I thought it was. So here goes!

Why you need an Editorial Calendar for your Blog…

For regularity

Most people have a good grasp on this point so I’ll only cover it briefly, but one of the most important and obvious reasons you should have an editorial calendar is to keep some regularity to your posts.

To start with, find out which day(s) your audience is most responsive (this might take a little research, trial and error etc.) and set that day as your ‘blog day’. Let’s say that’s a Wednesday.

No matter what kind of calendar you have, whether it be a basic spreadsheet, a Google Docs calendar, or a plugin/widget of some sort (we use WordPress so we have a cool plugin, linked at the bottom), just add a note like ‘blog today’ on every Wednesday for the next few weeks and there you have the foundation of your calendar.

Providing you stick to it, it’s literally as easy as that. Defining a regular date for your posts can help you fit your blog into your workload a little more seamlessly and can help search engines decide on how often it will crawl your pages (it’s way more technical than that but that’s enough for now). It’s also good to maintain regularity for your audience but I’ll cover that a little further down.

Here’s a snippet of what ours looks like:

For keeping track of ideas

Personally, a big use for my editorial calendar is to keep track of ideas. I think from the headline downwards most of the time so it’s really handy for me to jot down some titles that I want to research and write about.

Having a calendar also allows me to add a rough title to days when I know I’ll want to cover that particular topic. Which brings me to…

For marketing assistance

If you know that one week your company is doing a push of a certain product it could also be handy to have an accompanying blog post.

Example: So if I know that my company want to push the Lawnmower 3000 on Wednesday in 3 weeks time, I’ll jot down an idea for a blog post to go up that week, maybe something like ‘How the Lawnmower 3000 can benefit small businesses’.

That way you’re keeping up with the regularity of your posts, aiding in the current marketing push, as well as giving visitors a link between your product and your blog.

For motivation

Your editorial calendar can also help you with motivation. It links back to the point above about fitting your blog into your workload – By choosing a blog day you’re setting yourself a deadline, and what better motivation to complete a task than having a deadline?

For your audience

I’ve covered it briefly earlier on but having an editorial calendar for your blog is vital for maintaining regularity for your audience, not just for yourself.

Yes, it’s helpful to have it there as a reminder/motivation, and yes it can be a good notepad for your ideas but all of that ultimately means nothing if you can’t convince your audience to come back, or better yet, give them the need to come back.

Being able to provide your audience with regular blog posts gives them a reason to keep coming back to your site, Follow you on Twitter, add your blog to their RSS feed, Subscribe on Facebook etc. If they know they’re going to get regular content that’s beneficial to their business or interests, they’ll actually need to come back.

So, in brief, that’s why I think you need an editorial calendar for your blog!

We use the WordPress Editorial Calendar which is free. You can find it here: http://stresslimitdesign.com/editorial-calendar-plugin

What is the Canonical Tag?

The Canonical Tag is a HTML tag that helps search engines to deal with pages that contain duplicate content. The tag is mainly used on pages that are slight variations of an original page, such as landing pages, printer friendly pages, gateway pages etc.

How is the Canonical Tag used?

The Canonical Tag is used to tell search engines that the URL containing the tag is a duplicate of another URL. Meaning that the rankings, link juice etc on that page should be given back to the other (and original) URL. Its like saying that all pages with a Canonical Tag on linking back to the same main page should be treated as one big page.

There are a number of different reasons for using the Canonical Tag; a good example to use is ‘printer friendly’ pages. If a webpage is duplicated and simplified into a printer friendly webpage, search engines will want to try and crawl that content.

This means that there are two pages with exactly the same body of content and obviously you don’t want this as it can cause duplicate content issues for your site. The original webpage is the page is the page that was initially designed for web viewing, so that’s the one that should be indexed by search engines.

In order for this to happen the printer friendly page needs to contain a canonical tag referencing the original page.

What does the Canonical Tag look like?

In the above situation, the Canonical Tag will appear on the printer friendly page like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=http://www.originalpage.com />

How do search engines look at the Canonical Tag?

The best example of how search engines look at the Canonical Tag can be taken from The Art of SEO (Spenser, Enge, Fishkin, and Stricchiola), and looks like this:

When a search engine is faced with a page that has a Canonical Tag referencing another site it will treat the page almost as an extension of the referenced site.

How does the Canonical Tag differ from a 301 Redirect?

The Canonical tag differs from a 301 redirect in that it is only used for search engines – human’s will still be able to view each page involved in the canonical cycle.

A 301 redirect will point humans to a different page, effectively making the URL with duplicate content (the printer friendly page) redundant. When that URL is entered into a browser, it will simply point to a different page.

Google is seriously stepping it up with the features it’s offering Google+ users in 2012, so much so that it’s given users a full photo editing tool that allows you to quickly add colour and text to images, effectively creating your own meme.

The editing tool (called the (‘Creative Kit’) is, of course, basic; but it definitely does the job of offering Google+ users one more kitsch feature that Facebook and Twitter can’t. Better still, the Creative Kit is really easy to use and obviously completely free.

So, if you fancy jumping on the meme bandwagon here’s how you can create your own meme with the Google+ Creative Kit:

Step 1 – Pick your photo

You can either choose a photo that you already have in your Google+ or you can upload one and go from there (either way, the photo needs to be in your own albums, you can’t pinch someone else’s image).

Once you’ve decided on your photo you just need to click it so it opens in the light box and there you should see a toolbar in the top left corner of the box.

(I’m using the example of the ‘Philosoraptor’ meme, one of my favourites.)

Step 2 – The Creative Kit

In the toolbar you should have a ‘Creative Kit’ button with three little yellow stars as the logo. Click on this and it’ll bring up the photo editing tool for you to play with.

You have the ‘Basic Edits’ tab which will allow you to crop, rotate, resize etc. and you also have the ‘Effects’ tab which will allow you to add an effect to the image; black and white, different fades, softens etc.

‘Decorate’ allows you to do Paint-type stuff with brushes and shapes, and it also gives you the option of adding things like pre-designed fake beards and speech bubbles to your photo.

The ‘Text’ tab is obviously the one which will allow you to add text to your photo. It offers loads of different fonts to choose from, and they’re not just your typical MS Word fonts either so you’ve got room to be a little more creative if you want.

Step 3 – Adding and changing text

Finally you’re gonna want to add some text to your photo. It’s easy to do, you just select the font you’d like to use and type your text in the box at the top of the font list.

When you click ‘Add’ underneath the box your text will appear over your image. You can stretch it out, shrink it down, bold, italic, change the colours, rotate, flip etc. all the normal text editing stuff; and if you decided you want to change the font all you do is click on your new font and your text will change; no highlight/selecting needed.

Step 4 – Saving and finishing

Once you’ve added your text and made your meme you need to click Save and you’ll be given the option to replace the existing photo or to create a new one (it will save in the same folder you chose the original photo from).

(Ignore the typo)

Just select and option and voila! Meme created.

Have you created any meme’s on your Google+ page? Let us know in the comments below.