Tik Tok is just for the kids right? I’m pretty sure the same was said about Facebook and Instagram when they were both released. Of course its true, the current demographic of users on Tik Tok is 18-24year olds, however this is starting to shift. And we are seeing more and more brands moving towards this popular app to include it in their marketing strategy. The app is most definitely on its way to finding mainstream popularity.
Tik Tok is a video sharing app allowing users to share short form, 15 second videos. Originally stemming from musica.ly, Tik Tok has been massively popular in Asia and is now taking the rest of the world by storm.
Tik Tok is one of the most downloaded apps in the world with over 500 million active users worldwide. Although still relatively in its infancy as a social media platform, especially in terms of brand awareness for business, its rapid growth should not be taken for granted. Tik Tok is here to stay and it has the power to be a really incredible tool for businesses looking to expand their online presence.
Much like in Instagram and FB stories, Tik Tok presents an opportunity to connect with audiences in new, fun and engaging ways. Depending on your exact brand tone of voice, you can be funny, serious, controversial, positive and political to your hearts content. You need not think that you should have to spend your time on the app lip synching to music videos!
So exactly what content can you include? Well the worlds your oyster…Product reviews, handy hints and tips, behind the scenes details, product reveals, brand advertising. 15 seconds is a perfect amount of time to capture audience attention and deliver your brand message.
Much like Instagram, Tik Tok relies on hashtags to help users discover new content. Again, just like Instagram it has an explore tab for users to see trending hashtags and content as well as a search function for people to search on individual hashtags.
One of the most exciting current strategies on the app at the moment is running a hashtag challenge. Commonly used by influencers and businesses, a hashtag challenge is an incredible way or prompting engagement and building a community around your content. At this stage in the app’s lifetime this also means this a real opportunity to create viral content quickly. Hashtag challenges are simple to join in and fun. If you’re not yet a well-established brand, you can also consider using influencers to help kickstart your challenge campaign.
Authenticity should be at the core of any digital marketing campaign and your Tik Tok strategy should be no different. Being in its infant stages means that it hasn’t yet been flooded by brands trying to make their mark. With this in mind a focus on community and creativity should be the centre of your campaign rather than pushing sales. By doing this you will most definitely succeed in building your legacy and brand growth.
At Yellow Tuxedo we have recently joined the app. Although we are relatively new we can already see how much potential there is being in that space. 2020 will see us working hard on our strategy to cement our own Tik Tok presence. You can find us on there by searching @yellow_tuxedo .
The big question is…who else wants to be an early adopter? Who wants to join us? If you need any support getting started just get in touch. And be sure to drop your Tik Tok handles in the comments so that we can follow you!
Have a great day!
What is ALT text?
Why we should be using Instagram ALT text
How do you implement ALT text in Instagram?
At the beginning of 2019 Instagram launched a brand new feature…The Instagram ALT text. We think that this is a MASSIVE big deal yet so many instagram users are still yet to jump on this amazing feature. In todays blog post we are going to explain exactly why each and every business shoud be using Instagram ALT tags and we’ll show you exactly how to do it.
Quite simply, ALT text or ALT tags is short for “alternative” text. Its commonly used when optimising images across all of our online content to give context and understanding to what our images are about. It should descriptive and can include your keywords but ultimately explain exactly what is showing up on the page. If you’re not including ALT tags on your regular online content you are missing out on so much potential traffic!
There are 3 MASSIVE reasons why you should start using ALT text today, without any delay.
1. Accessibility. It helps visually impaired online users access your content. Screen readers literally use ALT texts to describe what is happening for their users. By creating a more accessible instagram feed you are opening yourself up to a wider instagram community of people who can engage with you.
2. It helps you work with the beloved Instagram Algorithm. By explaining in black and white exactly what it is your post is about you will help the powers that be at Instagram know where to put your content.
3.Its allowing you to optimise your instagram content for SEO. The most exciting development in our opinion!! Finally there is a way to optimise your content for Google to help rank your content far beyond the social media platform. We’ve talked long and hard about your Google keyword strategy. You should be applying this to your Instagram SEO strategy too.
Including ALT text couldnt be simpler and takes no time at all to do. When creating a new post take the following steps…
1. Upload your image and write your caption as normal.
2. At the bottom of the screen hit the “advanced settings” button.
3. Click on “Write alt text” and include your descriptive alternative text. [ be sure to include keywords if you want] This is not seen by the end user.
4. Post as normal. DONE!
To go back and edit ALT text on historic posts its just as simple. Click the 3 dots top right of the post and click edit.
in the bottom right corner of the image it will say “alt text” if you click there you can include the text as before and re-save.
We hope you’ve found this post useful and that it might encourage you to make use of this awesome instagram feature to help improve your online visibility. As always, if you have any questions be sure to post them in the comments of get in touch with us via our contact page if you’d like some help to get started.
Emily x
Surely we all want more organic traffic?
If you have a website, then we figure you’d like more visitors!
To get more visitors, you need to grow your online presence to help you rise up the Google rankings!
To grow your online presence, you need to work on your on digital marketing!
Well, here’s our FREE 5 part video training that tells you exactly what to do to make all of the above happen…
The best bit is that each video is only 15 minutes long, so will fit easily into your day.
Our FREE training course has been designed to take you through the journey of what you need to do to grow your online presence. The training, which is based around our 5 Theme strategy, is our holistic approach to growing your online presence, through digital marketing, which in turn increase your websites organic traffic.
Our 5 themes are:-
1- Your Brand
2 – Your Website
3- Your Blog
4- Your Social Presence
5- Your Legacy and PR
‘We start with ‘Your Brand’ and cover some principals to increase your domain authority and some basics which will get potential clients wanting to follow you, then we look at your SEO & Keywords on ‘Your Website’ as we want to make sure your website is fully optimised. Next up is ‘Your Blog’, one of the most important factors when you to get new traffic to your site [you’re reading this blog post aren’t you!], then we tell you what to do across all of your social platforms with ‘Your Social Presence’ and we finish with the exciting part, the bits you can’t plan for under ‘Your Legacy and PR’.
We dont always talk about this, but it was using this strategy that got one of our other businesses ‘Baylily Bell Tents‘ featured on ITVs This Morning multiple times.
~
To sign up and learn from our FREE SEO Training Course, just click on the below link.
Click here for our free SEO Training Course
Thank you and fun always.
Alan xx
PS.. If you’d like to know more about us, then just click right here.
Why use Google Ads Keyword Planner?
We often see in Facebook groups questions like the following :-
“What would you type into Google if you were looking my business”
Followed by lots of people answering with what they would type into Google and why.
Surely, the best thing to do and ultimately the easiest, is to actually ask Google what people type in! You’ll then be sure to see every possible option of what people type in on a regular basis, the search volumes of those key words and many more interesting bits of information.
And this is where the magic happens. You can then research long and short tail keywords, making sure that all the keywords you wish to use across your website and your optimised content are actually used and what search volume they have.
As a side note, what is best to use? Short Tail or Long Tail keywords and what’s the difference?
Well, short tail would be something like ‘Bell Tent’ and Long Tail would be something like ‘Bell Tent hire Hampshire’ [we’re using examples from our other business, Baylily Bell Tents here].
In theory, the long tail have a lower search volume, but therefore a more engaged viewer, which in turn would mean lower bounce rate and higher conversion. We advise that you balance it out between long and short tail. Perhaps 80% of your keyword use is long tail and 20% is short, this gives your site the opportunity to appear along side others on the higher search volumes and allows Google to recognise you and your site as an authority on all derivatives of your keywords.
This video below, shows you how to find, login and use Google Ads. Google Ads is where Google hide their Keyword Planner for all to use for free.
Just remember, you may need to create an account, but that doesn’t cost you anything and you certainly don’t need to start an ad campaign.
If you’d like to go straight to Google Ads to get started, then you can by clicking on this link right here.
To find out more about who we are and why we want to help you get the most out of your website, then just click right here.
We’ve created our free SEO Training course, because we understand how difficult it is to start a business, keep it going and to grow it. Having to juggle all of those balls, whilst ensuring your website gets traffic to be able to convert into customers takes up a lot of time. Where do you start?
Your business is amazing, it deserves to be seen, so let us help you.
Our course has been designed to help you understand exactly how to grow your online presence to send your website up the Google rankings and ultimately help to bring organic traffic to your website and more eyes on your business.
Each part is just 15 minutes long and will be delivered into your email inbox for you to watch and learn from.
The 5 parts have been designed around our core themes and these together give you a holistic approach to growing your online presence.
1- Your Brand
2 – Your Website
3- Your Blog
4- Your Social Presence
5- Your Legacy and PR
To sign up and learn from our FREE SEO Training Course, just click on the below link.
Click here for our free SEO Training Course
Thank you and fun always.
Alan xx
PS.. If you’d like to know more about us, then just click right here.
The last quarter of the year always goes so quickly with big events like Christmas getting in the way. The new year will be soon upon us. Let us help you kick start 2020 the right way by showing your how to grow your online presence for yourself. with our 1 day workshop “Introduction to Growing Your Online Presence”
Online presence is how individuals or businesses are represented online through their website, their social media channels and other online tools.
We know that so many of you are spending too much time on social media and that you are fed up of not seeing a return. Its an extremely frustrating space especially when platforms like FB and instagram change the goal posts so frequently with their algorithm updates…
As business owners ourselves we understand how a lot of the time we feel time time poor trying to juggle every aspect of our businesses. Let us show you how to simplify your efforts and ensure that your time on social media is spent effectively and for the right reasons.
We have created a 1-day workshop “An Introduction to Growing Your Online Presence” that will provide you with simple and easy to apply tools that will help you navigate your online presence ready for the start of 2020.
The day will be broken down into both theoretical and practical elements and will be balanced between two main areas- Your website and your content strategy.
In the first part of the workshop we will look at analysing your businesses current online presence and then explain, in plain English, the following..
In the second half of the day we will look at your content strategy for your business and will explain how to optimise this content across multiple platforms in a simple and strategic way.
The cost of the day is £175 and will include refreshments throughout the day and a light lunch.
We are are running the “Introduction to Growing Your Online Presence” workshop on three dates across October and November from our Yellow Tuxedo base in Botley Southampton. The day will start promptly at 9:30am and we will finish at 3pm.
Thursday 24th October
Tuesday 12th November
Tuesday 26th November
Due to the fact that we want to have time to work with each and every one of you properly we are limiting each day to just six delegates. Further dates will be released if these prove to be popular.
Please click to email the Yellow Tuxedo team here to to secure your place. As much as possible we would like to ensure that only one business from each industry is represented on each day.
Once we have received full payment you will receive your joining instructions for the course.
Yellow Tuxedo is proud to announce that we will be working alongside Barclays Eagle Labs this September to provide a training session to entrepreneurs in the Southampton region about maximising their online presence.
Barclays Eagle Labs is a national network created by Barclays Bank and is on a mission to help make the UK the best place to start and grow innovative businesses by promoting creativity and entrepreneurship.
Southampton City Council has come onboard with Barclays to create a brand new Eagle Lab situated above the Marlands Shopping Centre in the city centre which includes co-working spaces and meeting rooms as as well as state of the art facilities including photographic studios and maker spaces. This will be the citys first collaborative co-working environment of its kind.
On Tuesday 24th September we will be delivering a free 2hr workshop at the Southampton lab from 5:30pm designed to help entrepreneurs to streamline and work on their online presence as a whole. We understand that for many start-ups and solo entrepreneurs that the world of online marketing can be overwhelming. We will be showing business owners some simple strategies to ensure that this becomes a much simpler and process driven part of the business by purposefully using macro content to share across their online platforms.
To find out more about Barclays Eagle Labs or to book a space on this event click here.
The Yellow Tuxedo team is always happy to attend speaking events and workshops. If you are organising an event of your own and would like either Emily or Alan to deliver a bespoke session for your group then please do get in contact as we are happy to have a chat about your specific requirements. You can drop us a message via our contact page or send us an email at [email protected]