This is a blog post for Joe Fava of Clothes2Home.com, which is a garment care company in Boyertown, Pa. I would classify Clothes2home as a dry cleaning service, but the truth is they do much more than just dry cleaning.
The other day I was in picking up some dry cleaning and Joe was telling me that he would like to increase the activity on his Facebook page.
So I did a little brainstorming and this is the video and blog post that resulted.
Clothes2Home Social Media Ideas
Give aways for doing something like signing up for the Clothes2Home newsletter, leaving comments on posts such as “Your Favorite Fava Page”.
Potential Contest Prizes
5 suit drive cleanings(I like the number five, as in a weeks worth of suits dry cleaned)
a free tux rental
free Fathers Day gift
A comforter dry cleaning
other
an iPod
To encourage those who get your email updates to follow you on various networks, give them an entry for adding you on each network. Also give an entry for each valid comment. Give additional entries if someone refers more friends.
Coupons- have weekly specials, and vary them to include listing different specials on each of the Social media outposts. Be sure to let your fans on Facebook and/or Twitter know about the special that is available on the other outpost.
Obtain foot traffic patrons email addresses and ask them if you can send them email or newsletter updates of specials and notifications when items are ready to be picked up.
Include links to your social media sites in your email correspondence.
Overall, I think Clothes2Home is doing a great job with their Social Media Optimization(SMO). The main thing is you are doing it, and you are not going to quit.
General SEO Suggestions for Clothes2Home
Add content to your site and do keyword research to find out what possible keywords to optimize.Use the free Google Adsense Keyword tool.
Create landing pages for your main keywords and include text links to them in your bottom navigation.
Bottom Navigation should be text based not graphic. Include links to landing pages, site map, disclaimer, contact page, directions, coupons..etc..
Optimize title tags with keywords..Clothes2Home does not need to be in every title tag or at the beginning of each title tag. Example Home page title tag might be
Make sure you use the same alt and title tag for pictures.
My Motorola Backflip has only a few more hours left in my life…I just got my iPhone 3GS, so I will be taking the Backflip back to the AT&T store in Boyertown as soon as I get this Motorola Backflip review post done.
And none too soon..
Having used the Backflip for about 3 weeks, I can honestly say there have been very few moments that have gone by when I have not cursed the poorly designed smart phone. Below is my video review of the Backflip, and below it you will find a list of my gripes..there might even be a list of the few things I like about the Backflip..a short list indeed.
Motorola Backflip Features I Like
The 5 mega pixel camera- nice for a cell phone camera.
A Video camera – my missing iphone 3G didn’t take videos.
The wide qwerty flip out keyboard for easier texting.
Updates your Social Media profiles instantly with Motoblur.
A touch pad on the back of the screen in addition to the touch screen comes in handy for correcting spelling mistakes in email and texts.
Motorola Backflip Features I Hate
Comes with Yahoo as the defualt search engine..I was unable to change it to Google, but did manage to make Google my homepage only the before.
The setting screen lets you adjust nothing. You would think this would be were I could change the default search engine to Google, but it doesn’t let you do it. I even had the people at the AT&T store trying to figure it out. My son came across a forum post that said it was possible, but it gave no directions on how to do so.
Often times when I get a call, it will not let me answer the phone. The “slide to answer” button did not work all the time.
During calls, the screen fades to black and the will come back on but will then fade after a few seconds, and will do this on off cycle continually…must be an energy saving feature.
Speaking of energy, I was continually having to charge the battery, and often I was left with a dead phone when there was not a charge to be found.
The car charger was not a a rapid charger..it seemed to take forever to charge via the car charger.
Often times my fingers would touch something and screens would appear or disappear without the least bit of reason why.
On the call screen the mute button is next to the call button, and on more than one call I accidentally muted the call.
The phone seems to have really poor reception, as I had trouble getting any calls in my basement office. It had not been a problem with my iPhone.
The notification that I have voicemail is either so small that I can not see it or non-existent..not quite sure, but I found my self calling my voice mail to learn I had missed multiple important calls.
Since last week the Foursquare app has refused to update the location..this might be a problem with the app..but any way according to the phone I am still in Coatsville, PA.
Every time the phone shuts down, you need to press the button to the left to see either the last screen you were on or the home screen.
The volume control is placed so that when you are using the qwerty keyboard, the volume keys accidentally get hit and often interfere with your texting.
The video camera did not download to my computer.. I was unsure which way to take the vids..the first one I uploaded to Youtube was upsidedown. It also lets you share via email, but it is in a file extension that I have yet to been able to use..I guess I need some software to be able to use it. That would have been nice to have in the box.
The touch screen is way to sensitive.
Dropped calls way too much.
It also does a lot of butt dialling even though I don’t put my phone in my back pocket, and do make a habit of hitting the hybernate button. My landscaper, must think I am a pain in the butt for sure.
As you can tell from the amount of negatives, my opinion of the Motorola Backflip is less than favorable. Perhaps I might be too spoiled after using an iPhone 3G for about 6 months. If I were a young teenager I would probably love this phone. But for me, I think I will be glad to be once again be using an iPhone.
You can check out this TechCrunch article which gives several methods for embedding links. If you decide to use Blackbird Pie, be sure not to use the https version of your tweet links. Also, you must click on the time link below the Tweet which says something like “about 1hr ago” and copy and paste that link into the Blackbird tool to get an embedded tweet like the one on this post.
Other Twitter Stuff
You do know that many of the search engines are using Twitter results for part of their real time search results right? Well tweets do often show up in the SERPs.
Something that makes me go hmm
As you may or may not know, as part of the Baldydog.com company, we not only do SEO, but I as the Social Media Director, do manage several other blogs.
In addition to all the blogs, as part of the Baldydog network, we have multiple sites to include directories such as Pixelheadonline, Online Legal Directory, Home Improvement Directory, and of course Alltravelsites.com to name just a few. If you want a complete list of our directories, leave a comment, and I will send you an email with the complete list of our directories.
Anyway, while reviewing and publishing travel site submissions on the travel directory, as part of the submission process, I usually send out several tweets about the newly added travel resource. I usually say something like the tweet below.
I also send out a tweet with the individual page for the listing and may include a direct link to the url of the listing if it is a short url.
Link Building Tip
What I have noticed is that links that I tweet, such as individual listing pages, will then be cached in Google. If I don’t Tweet them, they won’t get cached, and as you know, an un-cached page is as good as invisible to Google because it doesn’t know about the web page.
Does this mean you should go and send thousands of spam links to Twitter so they get cached? I wouldn’t recommend it. I think it is ok occasionally. What I try to do when I do these types of “resource addition” tweets, is to sandwich them between tweets that seek to share, communicate, rt, or be genuinely helpful.
Even these types of tweets, I feel are helpful and not spammy, as I am only tweeting about travel related resources, and most of the 2000+ followers have some sort of travel interest.
So How Can You Use Twitter for Link Buiding
Twitter links as you know are nofollow type links, so they really don’t count for much Google Juice, but they do serve to notify the search engines of your resource, which may otherwise have been uncached.
If you do link building as we do, when you get accepted into a directory, send out a Tweet for the actual listing page of your resource or the category page that your listing appears if it is not too heavily populated with other similar resources.
Try to get as many cached links pointing to your site as possible. Cached with PR is better, but cached at the very least.
So have you noticed similar results using Twitter, or do you think I am erroneous?
**note – to get the box around my tweets, I put the tweets into a table. <table border=”2″><tr><td>Tweet code</table></tr></td>
And none too soon..
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