Create a Media Section on Your Mobile Site

You may be interested in creating an entire media section on your mobile website, rather than simply having a single media page. Rich media such as photos and videos are engaging and help keep people on your mobile site. This post will walk you through the easy steps of creating a "media section" on your mobile website in the mobile management area of Squareberry.

Start With a Sub-Menu

The first thing you need is a sub-menu. On the Mobile Content tab select the "Add Page/Sub-Menu" button. Then select "Add Sub-Menu on the popup. This will take you to the Add Sub-Menu screen.

On the add Sub-Menu screen, provide a name for your sub-menu. This will essentially be the name of your media section. You could call it "Media", "Photos & Videos" or anything else you want. Once you create this, it will be added to the menu structure of your mobile site. You will see the sub-menu on your Mobile Content.

Add Media Pages

Now you need to add media pages to the sub-menu you just created. On the Mobile Content tab, click on the sub menu you just created. This will take you to that sub-menu. Click the "Add Page/Sub-Menu" button to add a page to the sub-menu, which means you are adding a page to your "media section".

Squareberry's Mobile Management area has several page types which can be used in this scenario, including Photo Gallery and YouTube Video. Photo Galleries allow you to quickly upload multiple photos to easily make a touch-friendly photo gallery. YouTube Video pages simply show a YouTube video for quick and easy play.

Alternatively, you can use the Custom page type to add any combination of photos, graphics and videos you want. These pages will all be added to the sub-menu you created, effectively building a mobile media center.

Track How Your Events & Promotions Perform

There is a lot of talk about analytics, metrics and return on investment when it comes to online marketing. Most of the time the focus is on how many clicks your organization gets, how much traffic you see or your number of "Likes" on Facebook. For most organizations, the most important thing to measure is how they actually do in the real world. Squareberry's event and promotion features are designed to help you market real world activities and specials that can lead to greater attendance and higher sales.

Events - Count It

Tracking the effectiveness of your "Events" is pretty straightforward. Simply count the number of people who show up for your event. This can be accomplished by having someone at the front entrance who's job is to count, running a raffle that everyone participates in or by counting "groups" based on number of transactions/checks.

Getting any kind of count can help you in your long term goals. If you track the attendance of your events you will be able to recognize trends and adjust to them. If your numbers begin to drop, you will know you need to mix it up or promote your event in different ways.

Promotions - Count It

For retails stores and restaurants, counting promotions is fairly easy. Your Point of Sale (POS) system should offer a promotion/coupon feature. You can input the promotion manually each time someone shows you their coupon or you can utilize the barcode feature to scan the coupon right off printed coupons and mobile devices. Your POS system should keep track of how many times your promotions was used by customers.

Sales - The Last Word

For businesses, the most important things to track is sales. This is obviously something you will already be doing. You may want to look at sales during periods or on days where you run promotions/events compared with days when no special happenings are going on.

Sales should be the last word and determining factor. You may feel your promotions or events was not as popular as you hoped, but your sales may have still seen a healthy boost and the effects could be ongoing from that boost. Sales numbers will always be king.

Using QR Codes for Your Mobile Pages

Recently we released new enhancements to the Mobile Management area which makes it easier than ever to link directly to a mobile page or utilize a QR Code to send people directly to a page on your mobile website. Every page you create in the Mobile Management area has a unique URL and a unique QR code that points to that page.

Utilizing QR Codes to Boost Your Brand

At the top right corner of the edit screen for each mobile page is a button "Link & QR Code to This Page". Click on this button to get a QR Code for the page you are currently editing. You can easily download the QR Code at that time.

Calendar Pages

Calendar pages are always great to utilize. Add a QR Code to your restaurant menu, in a local publication or on a mail-out. You can quickly send people to your events/promotions page on your mobile site to help draw them in to your location. Calendar pages help you carry people from printed material to mobile-friendly site, from mobile site to real world events and promotions.

Contact Forms

Your printed advertisement, brochure or mail-out can quickly be given an easy call-to-action by utilizing a contact form. Add a QR code on your printed material that links to your contact form. This allows anyone who sees your ad or brochure to instantly contact you via contact form/email. This can help generate leads, generate sales and get registrations.

Photo Galleries

QR Codes are perfect for enhancing printed materials. Local newspapers, magazines and publications can utilize mobile photo galleries and QR Codes to take their printed items to another level.

Start by creating a photo gallery page type. Upload photos related to the article or topic you are covering in the publication. The QR code can then be placed on your printed publication next to relevant information/articles. Now, people reading your publication can easily scan the QR Code and get a touch-friendly photo gallery on their mobile device to enhance their reading experience.

Using the New Image Uploader for Mobile Galleries

The photo gallery page type in the Mobile Management Area allows you to create simple, sleek and touch-friendly photo galleries for your mobile website. Photos are organized into a gallery view and can be viewed as a slide-show when you select an image.

Recently, a new image uploader was put in place for Photo Gallery pages in the Mobile Management Area. This new uploader allows you to upload multiple images at once, making creating photo galleries faster and easier.

Uploading Multiple Photos

When editing a photo gallery page in the mobile management area click the "Add Photo" button. This will bring up a popup with 3 buttons: "Select Files", "Upload" and "Clear". Click the "Select Files" button. This will bring up your system's file browser. To select multiple files on Windows hold the Control button and click on the files you want to upload. To select multiple files on Mac OS hold the command button and click on the files you want to upload.

Then click "Open" or "Select" on your file browser window. The images you selected will now appear in your upload popup. You can select more files, clear the selected files or click "Upload". If you click the upload button your images will being to upload.

Once the images are done uploading you can close the popup and your images will now appear under "Photos on This Page". You can drang and drop to reorder the images in your gallery. Click "Save" at the bottom of the page when you are done.

Tuesday Tip - Adjust Your Dashboard

Changing How Your Dashboard Looks

Squareberry allows you to customize and change your dashboard to display your social/mobile statistics and feedback accordingly. Every organization focuses on different aspects of marketing. Some are Facebook heavy with little Twitter use. Some organizations love to run interactive polls while others focus more on scheduled events. Every organization is different.

Squareberry's dashboard has various boxes that each show off different aspects of your marketing efforts. These boxes on your dashboard include:

• Facebook Followers
• Twitter Followers
• Social Statistics
• Facebook Demographics
• Listen&Count Polls
• Recent Twitter Followers
• Most Viewed
• Recent Sent Messages
• Social Influence Widget
• Recently Created Items

To adjust the Dashboard, click the "Adjust Dashboard" button at the top of the page. A pop-up appears allowing you to drag and drop the boxes into the order you want them to display. The left side of this pop-up is your active dashboard and the right side shows available boxes you are not currently using.

PDF Dashboard Report

Squareberry's Dashboard also allows you to export the Dashboard as a PDF Report. The PDF Report exports a set of boxes showing off a nice summary of your marketing stats. Simply click the "PDF Report" button at the top of the Dashboard page to export the Dashboard report.

Facebook Hashtags Are Here - What You Need to Know

What Are Hashtags?

#This is a hashtag. You've seen them. You may or may not use them. Their popularity expanded on Twitter and are also used on services like Instagram and Tumblr. Hashtags allow people to unify topics. Clicking on a hashtags allows you to see posts by users using that same hashtag, thus seeing what everyone is posting about that specific topic.

Until now, hashtags on Facebook had no functionality. Nothing stopped you from writing "#fun" on your Facebook post, but it had no specific function. Now, hashtags will be automatically turned into links which can be clicked by people who see your posts. They will then see a a feed of all other posts shared with them that use that hashtag.

From the Facebook Blog:

Introducing Hashtags on Facebook Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion. When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you'll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.

Read the full post from Facebook here.

Image from Facebook Blog

What This Means for Your Marketing

This is great for marketers and organizations on Facebook. It will help expand your reach and help your followers share what you are talking about in a more meaningful way.

For example, if you own a restaurant in San Antonio, you may want to send a message about watching the Spurs game at your location. You can add "#Spurs" to your message. Now, people around San Antonio will be posting the same hashtag and if someone clicks on one to view people talking about this topic, your restaurant may be present on that feed. Using hashtags helps you get your post in front of followers who are interested in the same topics at that moment.

Messaging From Squareberry

Whether you are sending an instant message or schedule messages far in advance, you can include your hashtags in the message you compose. The most interesting aspect of this is for people who publish to both Facebook and Twitter. Previously, using messages with hashtags on Facebook looked silly and offered little to no benefits.

Now, using the same message on both Twitter and Facebook is more feasible and can be more effective. The only major difference remaining between the two services is the character limit. Facebook still allows you to publish much longer messages. Because of this, you may consider still scheduling separate messages for your different social networks.

Tuesday Tip - Create Customized Calendars & Widgets

Showing off your events and promotions on your website is a key aspect of integrating your complete online presence. Squareberry allows you to create customized "views" with specified categories. This means you can have any number of calendars and widgets which display certain events/promotions based on the settings you dictate.

Create a New Event View

When you create a new Event View, you start by giving it a name. This name will be displayed on the top of the calendars. Next, you select what categories you want on this view. Events and Promotions from the categories you select here will be used on these calendars and widgets.

There are also various color settings you can alter. These colors effect the calendar views but have no effect on the widgets. You can also dictate a timezone for your view, this will adjust the time of the events to display in the specified timezone.

Lastly, you can decide to include events and/or promotions. If you do not want promotions on your view, simply uncheck the promotions setting. This allows you to control categories and event/promotions so that you can fully customize your calendars and widgets to show exactly what you want to show.

Embed Your Customized Views

Once you have created your customized view, it is easy to add it to your website. On the Calendars and Widgets list screen, there is an embed button to the far right of every listed calendar/widget. Click this button and you will get a pop-up with the embed code. There are different options for each calendar/widget which you can adjust to customize this particular embed. When ready, copy and paste the embed code into the HTML of your website.

Single Category Views

An interesting and effective strategy is to create single category views. This allows you to feature certain events and promotions on your website. Read More Here >

Samples of Calendars & Widgets

Click Here to check out samples of all the calendars and widgets currently available on the Squareberry platform.