Being Social without appearing spammy

[A Wade]

Hello All,

We promote our site Casinos Unleashed through normal SEO practices, however one area that we need to improve upon is our social media.

If we take Twitter as an example, we have an account @casinounleashed (Followers welcome), but I often wonder how best to prospect for potential customers?

Does everyone have "Casino" or "Gambling" words in their twitter usernames?
How do they find that affects the level of engagement - Good or Bad?
e.g. Do people's preconceived perceptions of the online gambling industry ever affect their campaigns positively or negatively? How do they capitalize/work around that?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Kind regards,
Natalie

[thebookiesoffers]

I use twitter quite a bit for sharing content but just don't go over board with it, maybe share 1 piece of content 2-3 times in a day

Found it ok for promoting free offers but not much more to be quite honest, it's a very crowded market on there these days

[muffincrumbs]

Twitter should be used to market your brand awareness. I would not focus on conversions there. The traffic from twitter is completely worthless as far as making money goes imo. Who would trust anything they see tweeted? Who ever would buy something, or spend money from a tweet is a person I have yet to meet. I swear that entire network is a bunch of marketers trying to market to each other lol.

Everyone has casino in their name because the twitter search is so rudimentary and un-intuitive that it will pull up user names as keywords sometimes before relevant tweets. But to answer your questions...

I have found some engagement on news articles. People feel like tweeting stuff that they feel like they were the first of their friends to discover something, but are only intelligent enough to type one sentence while sharing. I.E. we reported on Poker Starts return to the US, and the potential buying of Atlantic Club Casino far before any other online gaming news source. This generated a lot of tweets and shares organically, again with no input for us, just a button under the article.

[TravG]

When I use social media my username is my actual website domain or my homepage keywords. For example my website playusaonlineslots.com, my username is "Play USA Online Slots". Personally I do not find social media to be revenue generating and if it is I really do not know how to track that but it can create brand awareness.

As far as spammy, just use common sense. If you posting just to post then yes it is going to seem spammy but if you are making posts that you yourself would find useful then it makes sense.

[UKCasinoOnline]

I have often wondered this, and in my opinion I guess it all goes by are you promoting something "different". if a user is seeing lots of sponsored stuff on facebook to do with Gambling, are they gonna be inclined to click your post? If they are seeing the same old same on Twitter, are they gonna retweet, or just block you?

[A Wade]

Thank you to all who responded so far, the advice has been useful.

If we took a step back and looked at it purely from a "Return on Investment" point of view, would we all be better putting our marketing money in promoting on google, promoting on twitter, or an equal mix of both?

We've been front page of google before for some keywords, but still having difficulty converting.

[universal4]

If you do well on some keywords, and generate the traffic to the landing page for those keywords, and the traffic isn't converting, you are better off spending some time trying to increase the conversions, since better conversion on the traffic you do get is more important in many ways than more traffic that isn't converting....

Rick
Universal4

[traffickitty]

I actually was wondering about this... cause I believe if someone comes to post something useful, then I wouldn't have any problem on validating that comment. Not sure if webmasters think like this generally.

[Rostick]

Twitter should be used to market your brand awareness. I would not focus on conversions there. The traffic from twitter is completely worthless as far as making money goes imo. Who would trust anything they see tweeted? Who ever would buy something, or spend money from a tweet is a person I have yet to meet. I swear that entire network is a bunch of marketers trying to market to each other lol.

Everyone has casino in their name because the twitter search is so rudimentary and un-intuitive that it will pull up user names as keywords sometimes before relevant tweets. But to answer your questions...

I have found some engagement on news articles. People feel like tweeting stuff that they feel like they were the first of their friends to discover something, but are only intelligent enough to type one sentence while sharing. I.E. we reported on Poker Starts return to the US, and the potential buying of Atlantic Club Casino far before any other online gaming news source. This generated a lot of tweets and shares organically, again with no input for us, just a button under the article.

You`re going a little overboard with twitter there. I think you are on the 'wrong side' of twitter. While I agree twitter doesn`t convert much, it definetly converts. And facebook is much more of a marketers network, it`s way less personal than twitter can be. If you only put your feed on twitter, yea, it won`t convert. If you mix some personal brand-related stuff, it converts. I found way more succes on twitter than on facebook. But only because on twitter I have targeted followers ... facebook converts more it`s true, if you have people that are interested in what you say and not friends/bought likes.

I don`t like social media but it`s pretty useful. Just be who you are. Don`t state "Casino bonuses free gambling promotions play at casinos online" in your description. Of course, that`s a turn off. But putting casino in your descriprion/messages certaintly won`t send anyone away. You want people that are interested in casinos, no?

For example, my username on twitter is @betdistrict, totally bet related. And I got 1000 followers in one month, because i tweeted stuff of interest. I tweeted during games, etc.

[xecutable]

There was this webinar, perhaps a year ago and some of these seo experts were guests. They pointed out to use social networks correctly hence, for what they were meant for. They encouraged everyone to get involved, to create live discussions and to stick with the big ones, facebook, twitter, reddit.

I've tried a little bit of all, I even ran a few ad campaigns on facebook. If you ever consider this..... don't. People lie about their age, country, everything so totally unrelated people get to view your ads and spend your money. Hell some of them were even kids who had age around 63 so they passed the 18+ rule I had set up.

[ocreditor]

People seem to have gotten carried away with facebook and twitter. It's best not to go overboard I find, or it's just information-overload.

[UKCasinoOnline]

I think Facebook and Twitter it is very easy to go overboard I agree, also what I think people fail to overlook is how many "sponsored posts" a user is seeing, and probably becoming desensitized to. So if they see a Facebook post from your group, they'll become equally as dismissive of it.

[NorwegianViking]

I think it works really well for me, and I would say that whatever your brand or website name is, should be your user name in social media accounts too. That's how I do it anyway, and I have never had any bad reactions to it, I guess people think it makes sense (I do too).
as for which social media account to focus most on, it depends on what market you are in, I think. For me, Twitter and Facebook work best (Twitter better than Facebook), and Google + not at all, but that could be because I've been using Twitter and Facebook the longest. It usually takes quite a long time to learn what works best, it did for me anyway.

So initially, it may seem like social media efforts don't pay off, since it takes time to get an audience, but once you learn what to do, you can usually keep them running and converting with small efforts, so I would still recommend giving it a try.

[ocreditor]

Thanks for the input, I completely agree !

[Lyndon001]

I generally use Facebook and Twitter just to bring awareness to my blog sites

[ocreditor]

I found this nice guide for twitter newbies http://www.marketingsherpa.com/artic...sons-from-woot
at the bottom you'll see more links to more specific twitter guides

Cheers

[Maria678]

I think that it's important to take into account the features of every social network to use it properly for brand development, for instance,

On Twitter, check out what’s trending and jump into the conversation.
On LinkedIn, join a professional group to network or start a discussion.
On YouTube, browse channels and make a comment.
On Facebook, become a fan of a favorite organization or like a product. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/t...ine+Journal%29

I use name of my brand in Twitter (@GamblingLinkAds), but I think that account in FB, Google+ should look more personal.

[ocreditor]

Thanks for the link Maria, very good article !

Anyone knows a good social plugin for website, the one you can use to login with your facebook account instead of creating new account
on your site... ?