To all of our clients, friends and family a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Bua HQ.

We look forward to working with you in 2012.

Check out some of the great campaigns we got stuck into this year.

LookWest.ie MySummer Campaign

As part of our ongoing work for LookWest.ie with the Western Development Commission, we developed ‘MySummer’, a social media photo competition.

This nostalgic photo competition encouraged the public to enter their favourite summer moments captured in the West of Ireland. We clocked up an amazing 765 entries to the competition, with over 2,000 people voting for their favourite MySummer photo.

As a result of the campaign, there was huge growth across all LookWest.ie social media channels, with an extra 1,000 likes on their Facebook page in just two weeks.

IT Sligo Student Recruitment Campaign

As part of IT Sligo’s student recruitment campaign this year, we created an exciting new social media campaign based around their recent win at the Microsoft Imagine Cup, a world student technology competition.  With IT Sligo we developed an integrated digital marketing campaign which included social media, online advertising and email marketing.

Awards:

This year we were delighted to get more than our fair share of industry nods; we were shortlisted for Best Agency in the Social Media Awards and won the Best in Digital Marketing at the Dot ie Net Visionary Awards.

We were chuffed to have taken home the gong, especially as it was a public vote, again many thanks to all who voted for us.  Here is to many more to come!

SEO

So what is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is all about making your website appear higher in search engine rankings.

It is basically a cost-effective and highly popular way to get the word out about your online business.

How do I improve my website’s SEO?

Follow these simple steps which will help optimize your website and spread the word about your products and/or services.

#1. Let the search engines know you exist

Don’t wait for Google to find you. Add your site to Google’s database — and after that, to Bing’s and Yahoo!’s databases as well.

#2. Are you showing?

Peter Kent’s ‘SEO for Dummies’ suggest a great way to see what pages on your website are showing up in search engines;

Firstly, there are three major search engines used in Ireland, which are Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Type ‘site:yourdomain.ie’ into the search engine of your choice.

For example, let’s do it for Bua Marketing;

• Google : site:domain.ie e.g. site:buamarketing.ie
• Bing : site:domain.ie e.g. site: buamarketing.ie
• Yahoo! Visit http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com , type in your domain name then hit ‘Explore URL’.

After completing this exercise a number of pages from your site will show up in the search. Ask yourself; do the three search engines show similar numbers? Is this number in line with how many pages you have on your website? Did you find out that there are important (sometimes private) documents indexed that shouldn’t be? If this is the case you need to look into:

1. Removing these files from your website
2. Putting them behind some password system

#3. Do it for your users

Google’s number one aim is to provide high quality, relevant search results for its users. With this in mind, Google will reward websites with relevant, high quality content.

So, as you can imagine, high quality content is important not only from a ranking point of view, but also for your website users. Having a well structured website layout with high quality content will provide visitors to your site with relevant, easily sourced information on their search query, which in turn could turn a visitor to your site into a consumer of your products/services.

#4. Focus on Quality

As mentioned above, high quality content is very important when looking to improve your search engine rankings, especially on Google.

Blogging is one of the best ways to move up the search engine rankings as it is a good way to add high-quality information to your website.

However, web pages or blog posts offering little of value can negatively impact a website’s rankings. Removing these pages might actually help a website move up the rankings or recover from a drop in ranking.

#5. Pick Good Keywords

Many companies have no idea what keywords they should be using for their website. They try to guess the appropriate keywords, without knowing what their potential customers are using in search engines.

Here is how to do a quick keyword analysis;

• Go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool (Adwords is Google’s pay per click division).
• You will see a search box. Type in a keyword you think people may use to search for your products or services then click Search.
• Click the Get Keyword ideas button. You want to first target the phrases that have good search volume, but maybe don’t have as much competition.

#6. Get linked

Incoming links to your website can also help with your search engine rankings. However, high quality links are important here.  Make sure your pages link to other well-designed, content rich sites.

See who is linking you by typing into Yahoo link;domain.ie. For example, type link:sweetshop.ie into Yahoo.ie

Search engines are constantly evolving, but the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimisation remain the same. High quality relevant content will always do well in search engines.

Search Engine Land has put together a very cleverly illustrated guide that will help you gain traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing.

Main Image by Danard Vincente. Creative Commons License.

Second Image from  searchengineland.com

Social Media for Tourism: How to Engage, Excite and Measure.

Are you a hospitality or tourism provider in Sligo?  Are you keen to reach out to new audiences using the power of social media but not quite sure how to go about it?

Bua Marketing is delighted to be delivering a series of social media training workshops on behalf of Sligo Tourism this November.  Aoife Flynn of a squared will also be assisting in the delivery of these workshops

Course Content:

Through practical learning, best practice tips and a selection of local and national case studies, we’ll show you how to use Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools to open your business to a much wider audience and create a community of engaged followers.

• Module 1:  Social Media Marketing Overview
• Module 3:  Other Social Media Channels (with specific focus on location-based marketing tools)
• Module 2:  Facebook
• Module 4:  Your Social Media Strategy

When:

The course will run over 4 weeks in November.

• 9th November 7.00pm-10.00pm
• 16th November 7.00pm-10.00pm
• 23rd November 7.00pm-10.00pm
• 30th November 7.00pm-10.00pm

Where:

IT Sligo’s Innovation Centre

How To Register:

Contact Sile Garrett Haran at Marketing Sligo Forum on (071)9171905 or email: info@sligotourism.ie

This course is supported by the Sligo Leader Partnership and Team Sligo.

We’re more than a little chuffed to announce that on Friday night, we won the ‘Best in Digital Marketing‘ category at the Dot ie Net Visionary Awards.

With stiff competition, we were delighted to take home the gong, especially as this was a public vote.  So huge thanks to all who voted for us.

We are delighted that the results we have achieved for our clients have been recognised as exceptional both by a panel of industry experts and the general public.  This trophy will take pride of place in our awards cabinet, here’s to many more.

Bua Marketing Wins Net Visionary Digital Marketing Award from Aoife Porter on Vimeo.

Huge thanks to the Irish Internet Association for a great night.

Coming to a social media presentation near you!  This is a great infographic on the usage of Facebook in Ireland, created by Edelman Ireland, with help from Dave Molloy and Damien Mulley.

Interesting to see the most popular age groups.  Would be great if Facebook broke these down a little more.  We’d love to see a demographic category from 13-16 and then from 17-19.  Also, of course there are lots of Facebook accounts we know of from children, under 13, who lie about their age.

Here are the Top 5 things you need to know about the new Facebook Privacy Settings.

1. Inline controls at your fingertips

Facebook is moving most of the controls that would have sat inside your settings to the front so users can decide there and then what is happening with their content.

2. You decide who tags you

Previously if you were tagged in a photo, you were notified in your user profile as soon as you were tagged. Going forward, users will have the ability to approve or reject these tags before they show up in their profile. The same also applies to posts users may have tagged you in.

3. Easier access to Profile Settings

Facebook users previously had to search in settings to find the tool that showed them what their profile looked like to others. This tool is now on the top of your profile where it’s easier to access.
Also, content on your profile, from your hometown to your latest photo album, will appear next to an icon and a drop-down menu. This inline menu lets you know who can see this part of your profile, and you can change it with one click.

4. Enhanced Sharing Controls

In addition to the profile changes, it will now be more visually straightforward to understand and control who can see your posts at the time you share them. The control for who can see each post will be right inline. For each audience, there is now an icon and label to help make it easier to understand and decide who you’re sharing with.

5. Tag your location in any post – not just from mobile Facebook

You’ll be able to tag your location in any post. Previously you only had the option to check into locations via Facebook mobile. Under the new settings users can add location information to anything via a status update, wall post or photo upload.

So when will all of this happen?

According to this Facebook blog, the social networking giant says the changes will start to roll out in the coming days. When they reach users they’ll see a prompt for a tour that will walk them through the new features.

More from Facebook here.

Image Credit: CCTV by Dr John 2005 under Creative Commons on Flickr

All other images from Facebook.

We’re also delighted to announce that one of our favourite clients (yes we tell them all that), LookWest.ie has been shortlisted in the Best in Social Media category.  We have some fantastic memories from last year’s awards when LookWest.ie won the Best eGovernment Award, so fingers crossed again this year.

How to Vote:

So here’s the pitch: we need your votes.  If you feel we deserve it, or are just looking for some positive karma, we would love your support.

Vote for Bua Marketing in the Best in Digital Marketing category here.

Vote for LookWest.ie in the Best in Social Media category here.

The award ceremony will take place on Sep 30th in Dublin’s National Gallery.  Fingers crossed!

Image Credit:  Trophies by MGShelton under Creative Commons on Flickr

We beavered in the kitchen with it for a while and came up with MySummer, a photo competition to capture your favourite summer memories from the West of Ireland.

There are lots of photo competitions out there and lots of social media noise; so here are our tips to make your campaign shine.

1.    Make it interesting

Your audience is bombarded every day with brands trying to increase their social media reach; you need to make your campaign personal, fun or else give away one mother of a prize.

2.    Comply with Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines

Facebook will not allow you to run a competition on your Facebook business page wall.  Any of those Facebook pages you see that are offering prizes for ‘liking’ their pages or similar are ‘illegal’ in Facebook land and they could potentially delete your page.  Do you really want to invest all that time in building up your fan-base to have it disappear overnight?  It has happened to Irish pages we know.

For the MySummer campaign, we’re using Offerpop, which allows us to run a pretty slick photo competition with submissions by category, voting, customizable CSS etc.  We checked out a few others including Wildfire and based on costs and the really great customer service responses we encountered with Offerpop, we decided to give them a go.  Our only gripe is that they’re a US-based company and therefore we have to wait until lunchtime for a response.  We did consider bespoke development but the costs couldn’t compare.

We did receive some great advice on the Facebook for Business Ireland LinkedIn Group here.

3.    Measure Twice, Cut Once

Give yourself WEEKS to plan your campaign.  Especially if you’re going to develop visuals (which you should) for your various channels.  Have you created a landing page on your website?  Have you documented your T’s & C’s? Do you have promotional partners?  Have you laid out your timelines for submissions, voting and winner announcements?

4.    Bribery is very important

Honestly, there are hundreds of competitions running online all the time.  Your prize has to be a little special; if not in value in potential emotional worth.

5.    Use all your channels to promote

For MySummer we’re using all of LookWest.ie’s promotional channels both online and offline including the website, ezine, online advertising, social media.

For each phase of the competition, we have created visuals to encourage and ignite participation.  We’re also circulating press releases to generate a buzz in the traditional media.

What next?

MySummer runs for July and August; we’ve had more than 600 photos submitted so far, so looking good.

We’ve set some lofty objectives of what we want to achieve, so will report back after the campaign to let you know if it was worth all the effort.

• Social media removes barriers; we can connect, network and do business both locally, nationally and internationally and compete with big agencies in a way that we never could have 5 years ago.  (Hence us feeling a little chuffed when we were shortlisted as the only non-Dublin agency shortlisted in the Social Media Awards Best Agency category).
• We have to be honest, transparent and constantly creative.  The social media domain is a busy, noisy one.  If we churn out mediocrity, our results will be nothing more than mediocre.  We’re constantly having to think about how to engage and excite.  That’s the fun part.
• Everybody’s a publisher.  We can all have an opinion and get it out in the public domain. In fact given that 71% of Irish journalists are now on Twitter, we can now even go direct to the media ourselves to get our stories out there.  Having something interesting / relevant / exciting to offer your target audience will mean that you get more exposure than others, which is great from both a business and consumer perspective.
• PS We thought this journal cover might give you a bit of a chuckle.

Social Media Day Dublin

Created in 2010 by THE social media news site Mashable.com, there are Social Media Day celebrations around the world today connecting thousands of people face-to-face in their communities.

Dublin is where it’s at for Social Media Day celebrations in Ireland this year.  (Watch out for Social Media Day 2012 from the West of Ireland).

Check out this great interview by Ina O Murchú of the New Tech Post with the new Lord Mayor of Dublin, Andrew Montague, yesterday after he signed a scroll proclaiming Dublin as the first European City to proclaim Social Media Day.

AMAS Internet consultants have set-up a Dublin Social Media Day Tweetwall , so click here if you want to keep up to date on the various tweet-ups and face-to-face meet-ups around the capital.

Irish Social Media Stats

Of course, it’s nice to have the local stats too, so great that Neworld have recently (May 2011) updated their great blog post on Irish social media statistics here.