As a busy digital marketing agency, we are often focused on delivering the very best we can for our clients, but it is also important that we give ourselves a spot of TLC.

As our content team grows, we now have even more resource to drive our own digital marketing strategy and broaden our social media presence. We decided to look at the pros and cons for creating an Instagram account and evaluate its effectiveness as a marketing tool.

Enjoy our 7 reasons to answer your question, ‘Why Instagram?’.....

Instagram allows you to talk about everything that your brand offers through the use of imagery. Having a creative Instagram profile will give your business that competitive edge and showcase your creative talents. After all, they do say a picture speaks a thousand words!

2. Take a peek ‘behind the scenes’ of your business

Instagram is a great platform to show off the more informal side of your business. Whether that be staff social events, sporting activities or even scenic pictures from your office window, Instagram is the platform to upload these creative shots to allow users (or clients) to get to know you a bit better. People do business with people, so showing a more human side is always a plus.

3. Use hashtags to further your social reach

By adding hashtags to the caption of your Instagram post you allow the social reach to be extended. Users of Instagram can search to bring up all posts that contain certain hashtags. Using relevant hashtags can be extremely effective for getting your posts noticed.

4. Use the platform to tease what products/news you have coming

If you have an interesting case study coming up, new product launch that you're excited about or new developments to your website, Instagram can be used as the platform to tease this information. By using graphics such as “coming soon…” or “watch this space” it creates excitement with your followers and allows the anticipation and interest to grow around what you will be revealing.

In the Instagram photos that you post, you are able to tag other users in the post or mention them in the caption. By doing this, it not only shows collaboration with others, but increases the chance of engagement on posts as your image will appear under the “tagged” section of the user’s page that you have interacted with.

Instagram stories offer all the features of direct competitor Snapchat but allows you to have this feature under one platform. Instagram stories can be photos or videos, that appear on the top section of the Instagram homepage and are visible for 24 hours. The feature allows you to draw, add text, filters or fun stickers over the top of your content, allowing the Instagram user to get creative with content!

In addition to Instagram Stories, users can now go live! Unlike the feature that Facebook offers, Instagram Live videos instantly disappear as soon as the live video has ended, it really is like being at an event live! However, if you do want to upload a video to your account that will appear permanently, this can be done through the normal posting procedure.

If you are looking for some assistance in making the most of your social media channels and delivering a wide range of content, talk to us today and let’s get digital working for you.

7 reasons to use Instagram as part of your business' digital marketing strategy.

Here at CORE, we have a broad range of experience with content management systems of all shapes and sizes, from the usual open source suspects such as Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla through to enterprise systems such as SiteCore and Kentico. We’ve also seen our fair share of bespoke solutions and even developed our own client-only CMS; Blokk. Over the last 15 years we’ve worked with the good, the bad and the ugly.

One of the reasons we enjoy working with web technologies so much is because of the constant change, new thinking and new tools - there’s never a dull day. And, right now for us, one of the exciting things we are working on is our new approach to content management systems and content management solutions for our clients.

In this article we are going to introduce the key concepts and big ideas behind CaaS (Content as a Service), sometimes referred to as a Headless CMS, and how we see them shaping the future of our work here at CORE.

Content as a Service (CaaS) is when content components are independently set aside from the development of a website (in terms of the technological build process). In more traditional CMS platforms, the backend and the frontend of the website are glued together. A Headless CMS (sometimes known as a decoupled CMS) enables us to consider the elements independently and separate the front end (whatever type of application it may be: Rails, flat HTML / CSS, React, PHP) from the content management system, or, more accurately, the content as service system.

Via a CaaS system, the authoring and editing of content is a standalone feature. The Headless CMS is not in charge of business logic, delivering website services (such as form processing) or any element of the user experience (outside of content). Neither does it touch how the content will be delivered or presented to the end user, it simply delivers the content via API’s (Application Programing Interface) - a method with which other applications and technologies can consume the content.

Although CaaS has been around for some time, Headless CMS platforms are an emerging theme in a modern web development workflow with more and more companies taking this step into a decoupled mindset.

By far the most attractive and powerful features of adopting this method of working include:

By separating content systems from presentation systems both time and money can be saved.

Content for a range of websites / services can be managed from one location (e.g. a dedicated mobile application, a website and an email marketing campaign).

Content can be created to adapt to multiple frontend applications depending where the user is throughout their customer journey.

The possibility to give content authors and editors custom views and workflows built around their needs.

There are quite a few providers in the Headless CMS space and new ones are emerging. Our two current favorites are Contentful and Prismic. Here are a few standout features:

Define your own, unique content model that’s tailored to your project.

Host and manage all of your assets in one place, and update files without breaking public links.

Multiple API keys allows you to limit the content access by either device or environment type.

Built in Markdown editor allows for faster writing and wider publishing.

With secure previews, drafts and completed entries can be previewed without worrying about leaks or disruptions.

Teams can work with the externally-hosted content directly in the web app.

Preview changes on the website or app before publishing.

Ability to track all site modifications and discover who made each change.

Ability to localise your content and go global with native support and translation workflows.

Editors have the freedom to create components while the design and front end development remains consistent.

Custom Content Modeling features including a powerful ‘drag and drop’ content model builder.

Allows for publishing to any platform, design, programming language or framework.

As we’ve said, this is an area we are excited to explore further and we’ll be doing a more in-depth analysis of Headless CMS including code examples in forthcoming posts. So check back soon and follow us on Twitter to get notifications of future posts.

Headless content management systems and how are they changing the way we work.

If we have your attention piqued regarding how a headless CMS could solve your content problems, get in touch and we'd be happy to discuss how an integration could work.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a social media presence is now an essential part of an organisation’s marketing strategy. Social media enables a company to achieve business growth, increase customer engagement while developing and strengthening relationships.

Marketing has evolved dramatically from the modern 1960’s 4 P’s theory (Price, Product, Promotion and Place) to the post-modern digital marketing era. As internet speed continuously increases, the number of internet users increases in alignment. It is estimated that the majority of world’s population will be participating in any one of the social networks by 2025!

It is reported that 87% of marketers believe that the goal of social media is to increase brand awareness with 56% of executives stating that digital engagement with customers is at least a top ten company priority. Social media platform Twitter has over 313 million monthly active users, and over 500 million tweets are sent each day. Therefore, for businesses, the use of social media as a marketing tool has undeniable potential.

Twitter offers countless opportunities for businesses to reach a global audience of current and potential customers. Twitter is one of the most extensively used social media platforms in business and is used so much that approximately 73% of these businesses use the social media platform to communicate with their followers.

Twitter can be regarded as primarily a consumption channel, where 86 percent of users use it for business activities and reading other’s tweets. 58 percent of Twitter users have retweeted what they have read, 55 percent of users have posted a tweet, 54 percent have responded to a tweet, and 42 percent have sought support for a product. A user of Twitter follows other users therefore subscribing to the messages that they share.

Through the use of hashtags, social users can declare their interests and participate in topical discussions. As individuals and companies become influential on social media, they can use Twitter to share their message and have their message shared to a vast number of people. Each member of an online, social network has the ability to exchange information with other social users, ask questions and provide solutions to and from different locations across the world instantaneously. As individuals become more influential and the speed of exchanging messages increases on social media, it is important to consider the corporate image and reputation of a company in this digital age.

Corporate reputation can be seen as multi-faced as things can be perceived in different ways at different times by different people, thus there is a need to look at reputation drivers to consider the issues concerning stakeholders and to assign them to the relevant group. Should a stakeholder be dissatisfied by one or more of the reputation drivers, they may take to Twitter to express their feelings thus damaging the reputation of a company.

Social media tracking and the various monitoring tools available allows for an organisation to respond to accusations or misinterpreted communication via a twenty-four seven media platform. It is argued that social media messages should always be responded to and, when possible, within the hour. Therefore, controlling social media messages allows for successful symmetrical communication between the company and the stakeholder and for a successful corporate image and reputation management.

If you are looking for some help in making the most of your social media channels, get in touch with us today and let’s get digital working for you.

Twitter is a great business tool but there can be some risks.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a social media presence is now an essential part of an organisation’s marketing strategy.

How can Twitter impact the corporate image and reputation of a company?

If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?

Well I’m going to argue that in this particular instance, yes it does.

Now I must say ‘in this particular instance’ does relate to something very specific so I won’t quite be claiming any credit for solving metaphysical puzzles just yet. What I really mean by this answer is that just by ignoring something or being completely unaware of an event, it doesn’t protect you from it.

In our field this certainly relates to websites, their development and how they’re managed. The truth is that a lot of time and effort is expended in the design and development of a new website but when it is launched it is often thought by the client ‘job done’. The thing about digital, and it’s one of the reasons we love it so much, is that it is constantly evolving. Processes and techniques become out of date very quickly (looking at you reader in the year 2043, no judgements on how we used to do things please) and this should be both expected and anticipated.

The trouble is business owners rarely know much about how their site is performing. In our role here managing digital marketing campaigns, I couldn’t tell you the amount of times we’ve gained a client and in looking to gain a sense of their position in the search landscape, find that although we know there is a Google Analytics account setup for the site, no-one knows the login details. It seems to be an aspect of a site build judged as initially necessary as purchasing an SSL certificate and with the same attitude of once it’s there, it’s done.

But that truly isn’t the case and in knowing your way around Google Analytics, finding and monitoring just a few key metrics will really help you make the most of your site and the money which has been invested in it.

So you log into your account and what you’re presented with is something like this…

“So where do we start? Hmmm…”. I can image your internal monologue is something like this. 

I do appreciate that it can seem overwhelming at first glance but with a few tips you’ll actually find it’s pretty intuitive.

If you literally have a minute to spare and want to get a top line view of how your site is performing, the Overview section of the Audience tab is your destination. Here it will tell you how many sessions and users were recorded over a customisable time period while also giving you a snapshot of user engagement metrics (how visitors are actually behaving when on your site).

These engagement metrics are sadly undervalued in comparison to visit numbers which is often wrongly seen as the KPI. So for example you may receive an increase in traffic to your site which on the surface you see as a big win, but in reality with an additional rise in bounce rate (those visitors landing on your site and immediately leaving without engaging with your site at all), these new visitors are largely irrelevant.

In addition to these metrics you will also see various other bits of fun stuff included under the Audience tab. By switching on Demographic tracking, you can gain so much knowledge about the type of users your site is attracting e.g. age, gender, location, interests. By knowing this stuff you can understand what type of content your users are going to like and shape your site accordingly.

You can also monitor how many people are accessing your site via a mobile device under the Mobile section. This can help inform large site decisions you may want to make e.g. making your site responsive after finding that over 50% of your visitors come from mobile/tablet devices and are at the present time viewing a broken version of your site.

The Acquisition tab is very useful in determining how your users actually got to your site. Under the All Traffic section, traffic will be separated into silos such as:

Direct - those entering your site address straight into the URL bar or any traffic they cannot attribute a source for

Organic - those who arrived via a search engine

Referral - those who clicked onto a link to your site from another website

Paid Search - those who arrived via a form of online advertising e.g. Google Ads

Social - those who arrived via a social media channel

Email - those who arrived through an email marketing campaign

Each of these channels has its own data associated to it, allowing you to easily analyse performance of any campaigns you have running or prompt campaigns to be set up. For example, if you find that you have a very low percentage of visits coming from referrals, it may encourage you to start an outreach/link building campaign. This will hopefully help build a diverse visitor audience profile and reduce reliance on a single traffic stream.

The Behaviour tab is the place to go if you want to find out about the granular detail of site performance. This includes the popularity of site content and, perhaps more importantly, landing page content. Landing pages are vital as they are the gateways to the site for your visitors. So if you find that a good percentage of users are landing on a certain page of the website and you know it has a poor user experience (e.g. lack of content, weak navigation to key pages) you can adjust that page accordingly.

This section can also tell you about some of the more technical aspects of the site such as site speed. Sites that are slow to load, besides being incredibly frustrating for users, are unlikely to do well with Google in their rankings and so can have a real effect on organic traffic. This section can provide you with actual data to present to your web developers to get those site speed times as low as possible.

Of course, there is far more to Google Analytics than simply what is mentioned above but this will certainly go a long way in helping you gain a grasp of your site and how it performs.

It will hopefully provoke questions in your own mind and encourage a dialogue between yourself and your dev/digital marketing team in a bid to make sure your site is performing at its very best. 

So in short, make sure that tree falling in the forest is heard!

We’re going to start this post by answering a philosophical question which has been argued and debated across generations and has eluded some of the sharpest minds ever to have existed. What an intro ey?

For more advanced reporting features, please get in touch and we'd be happy to help find solutions.

The talk will be hosted by the designer Chris Bagot (Founder, Softroom) and Gavin Smith (Operations Director, Wahaca) and will be attended by the region's top architects, designers and restaurant / bar operators. It is one in a series of events which have been held around the world, with the aim to foster a shared communication of industry ideas and inspirations and is a must for those with a true passion for design.

Our role at CORE is as sponsors of the event while we're also Digital Partner to the annual Restaurant & Bar Design Awards, which celebrates the very best in global design. In fact this event's setting, Wahaca, Cardiff was this year's winner of best Multiple Restaurant at the most recent awards ceremony in October.

CORE have been involved in supporting the Restaurant and Bar Design Awards since its inception in 2008 and is something we're proud to see develop into the fantastic event it is today.

It has been our responsibility to oversee all aspects of digital for the awards; including the brand and identity work / design, build and ongoing support for the Awards website, the online application system and online discussion and adjudication process.

Over recent years, taking advantage of our growth into a rounded digital agency, we have also been charged with handling the digital marketing for the awards ceremony, including social media management on the night.

The talk is open to architects, designers and operators involved in the hospitality industry and is strictly RSVP with limited numbers - if you're interested in attending please email the names, roles and email addresses of all attendees to:rbdtalk@wearecore.co.uk

We are delighted to announce that CORE are sponsoring a free to attend 'Restaurant & Bar Design Talk' being held at Wahaca, Cardiff on Wednesday the 2nd December 2015 at 6:30pm

We are delighted to announce that CORE are sponsoring a free to attend 'Restaurant & Bar Design Talk' being held at Wahaca, Cardiff on Wednesday the 2nd December at 6:30pm

In our field it relates to good quality link building, that is gaining links from reputable sources pointing to your site, and it is the cornerstone of building a website’s reputation and its standing with search engines. However, in classic search double edge sword manner, poor link building is also very likely to hurt your reputation and rankings. i.e. when using the example of our friend Euripides, you're going to be judged by the crowd you associate yourself with.

Google has often attempted to warn sites off looking for quick fixes through such ‘spammy’ methods as content farms, with the lingering fear of manual actions and penalties always lurking in the background.

So it certainly pays to perform a link audit on your site once in a while to keep an eye on any potential opportunities/difficulties.

As the saying goes, there is more than one way to crack a nut and in cracking this particular nut there are many tools at your disposable.

One of the first items on the agenda when it comes to an all-inclusive link audit is a proper, in depth crawl of your site. Tools such as Screaming Frog’s SEO spider is a particular favourite of ours (free for the first 500 URIs and £149 a year above that), while there are others out there which do much the same job.

This will help you to immediately uncover any strange goings on with your site including odd and unnatural error codes.

Another tool which should be within the first port of call for any investigation into links is through Google Search Console. In your account you will find a ‘Manual Actions’ page which will warn you of any penalties inflicted by Google due to unnatural links and what you need to remove them. However, this post comes from the angle that you are just performing some good SEO housekeeping rather than reacting to a horrendous drop off in rankings/traffic. Indeed, hopefully, if you make a good link audit part of your practice, you should never need to react to a manual action!

Digging deeper could require the use of tools such as Moz's Linx Explorer and Ahrefs, with our personal preference heading for the former. However, the main crux of these tools are to find a list of URLs linking to you, their anchor text and their domain authority (Moz also has a 'spam score' functionality which is particularly helpful in this regard).

So now that you have got yourself a list of links, what actually constitutes a bad one? Well although you will probably find many links out there which seem spammy (e.g. random links from irrelevant sites), this is largely 'cruft' and Google claims they are pretty good at determining this as such (i.e. not your fault or malicious). What we are really looking for are links which obviously are a part of a wider campaign to farm links e.g. hidden text links, paid for links - take a look at Google's Webmaster Guidelines for more info. These types of links are the ones which may get you in trouble.

If you do find something that you know is out of place (not simply cruft), make sure you act on it. The problem will not just go away and unfortunately for you Google does not take ignorance as an excuse and you run the risk of being slapped with a manual action.

The first, and most mild, action you can take is to contact the site owner and ask for your link to be removed from the site. Obviously this is dependant on the site owner taking action and not simply ignoring you, which often can be the case. A more extreme step is to use Google’s Disavow tool which will ask you to upload a list of links you no longer want pointing to your site and Google itself will remove them. However, it is noted that you should use this tool with caution and only after you are sure that this is a link you definitely don’t want associated with your site.

As mentioned earlier, a good link audit will help prevent potential disasters in the future and keep you in Google’s good books. It will also allow you to keep track with how any link building campaigns are progressing and how your site in general is evolving.

Simply put, a thorough link audit is good SEO practice and something which is vital in maintaining and improving site health.

"Every man is like the company he wont to keep" - Euripides 438BC. Now you may be forgiven in thinking that good SEO in the 21st century and the words of a Greek playwright writing two and a half thousand years ago may not have had a lot in common...

Now you may be forgiven in thinking that good SEO in the 21st century and the words of a Greek playwright writing two and a half thousand years ago may not have had a lot in common. Indeed you would be right..

Unsure whether something you've found is 'cruft' or malicious? Get in touch with us and we'd be happy to help.

On 26th February 2015, Google made the announcement on its official Webmaster blog that it would be “expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal”. It also made the very unusual move to announce when this algorithm change would begin taking place; April 21st.

In terms of its direct implications, from what we can tell Google will be rewarding websites which have optimized for mobile usage, be that responsive or 'm.'. Now to anyone who's been listening to Google or recent features they have been pushing lately (including it’s mobile-friendly labels which have appeared on mobile Google SERPs), this will not have been a surprise.

From a Google POV, user experience is key and those sites which don’t cater for their mobile visitors don’t deserve the best rankings. In short, those which don’t have a site optimised for mobile usage may well see their organic mobile rankings drop.

In terms of what Google deems ‘mobile’, that may be a little harder to determine. Tablets may exist in the grey area of this update, but from recent trends it may be safer to presume tablets will be included as mobile in this update.

That really depends on the nature of your business. At a recent conference, a key trends analyst from Google stated that this update will be bigger than the much-feared Panda and Penguin updates. Although, he also importantly noted that the algorithm change will only affect your mobile rankings and not your desktop terms.

‘So if I don’t rely on mobile visitors to my site for conversions, I’m alright then?’ 

Well maybe in the very short term, but in the long term you're probably sticking your head in the sand. If you’re not providing for your mobile visitors then you're not providing a good user experience in general and if metrics like bounce rate and other user engagement signals take a plunge, this will affect your desktop rankings.

In the long term, there must be an ambition to optimize your site for mobile. This becomes a greater priority if you know from Google Analytics that you rely on your mobile visitors for sales or conversions.

If you want to check to see if your site is optimised for mobile in Google’s eyes, they have launched this easy-to-use Mobile Friendliness tool. Simply type in a URL from your site and Google will give you a binary response of yes or no (and an Americanised ‘Awesome’ to make you really feel good!)

In general, this update is a solidifying of Google’s increasing emphasis on mobile, but really you should be thinking of your visitors’ user experience anyway. Take the time to flick through your website on a mobile device and really think, would I use this website?

The SEO community has been all abuzz as of late, which usually means one thing; algorithm drama. This time it’s the turn of mobile which has the spotlight shining bright. So what’s really going on?

With Google’s mobile algorithm update on the horizon, we take a look at its real implications for you as a business.

If you're concerned as to how a mobile view of your site might be letting the side down, get in touch and we'd be happy to chat through your options.

We see some very beautiful, well laid out visuals: very detailed, grid based designs with precise typographic layout.

We often think of these ‘flat’ layouts as being the ‘breadth’. They are fully immersive snapshots - and are representative of how the website will look on a two dimensional plane. Often they are detailed and engaging. However, these designs, while often submitted as the finished article, are only the initial visual interface of the website; the projection of the identity and the brand values as visual design intended to create an emotional resonance with its audience in a matter of seconds.

Our issue with this is that graphic designers are mostly trained to achieve engaging results in two dimensional visual media. When working on a website layout, therefore, they often treat it the same way as designing a poster. Striving to achieve a fine balance with elements of interface design: moving the elements of the design two pixels to the right, two pixels to the left and, perhaps, back again. All carefully and thoughtfully crafted to achieve the best impact and balance possible.

Our clients and partners work hard on this aspect of a project and, once completed, the end client is usually fully on board and happy to sign it off. Then it’s over to us, and the fun begins.

As a front-end web designer I strongly feel that this is only one half of the (visual) puzzle. Although there has undoubtedly been a great deal of consideration given to the visual impact and emotional resonance of the flat design up to this point, they can often fail when marrying the user interface (UI) with the user experience (UX). A graphic designer is rarely asked to consider the whole user experience on a functional level and across different devices, and this is something that we, as web designers and developers, excel at.

Where experienced web teams can add value is in considering the ‘depth’ of a website. Web developers, as an intrinsic part of their role, have to consider how a user is going to follow a path through the website.

At Core we find that in situations where we are able to work in tandem with graphic designers at the visual design stage of a project, then a better solution can be presented to the client. If this can be done before they buy into a visual design that is not as practical or workable then it’s a better situation for all stakeholders in the project.

We have over 20 years experience in marrying the breadth and depth of a successful web design. We are always happy to discuss any potential issues with our design partners and offer reasonable and practical solutions throughout the process - often before the end client is involved. Presenting a design for sign-off with little or no assessment of the function of a website could result in lengthy re-design processes, failing to meet deadlines, and worst of all undermining the client’s confidence in the successful delivery of the project.

We can help to avoid these pitfalls - we champion breadth and depth in web design, as well as the true spirit of collaboration and working in partnership to deliver outstanding results.

Building a great website that performs well is a multi-faceted task. Graphic designers and developers working together as a team should be a rewarding and successful process, and will mean nothing is left out of the brief.

In this post, we give you an insight into how we go about designing our websites and the thought processes behind our decisions.

Businesses who can tap into this constant flow of conversation that Twitter brings will find that their brand exposure can increase massively in a relatively short amount of time. But what are the dos and do not dos of using Twitter effectively?

First things first, if you are using Twitter and your Bio isn’t up to scratch you’re not going to get anywhere. Keep the text short, to the point and make sure there are links to your website or anything else you wish to promote. In terms of the image, if you are still the simple shadow silhouette you are screaming out not to be followed! So always change the image to one which you feels represents your company at its best e.g. your logo.

Obviously Twitter at its heart is a communication tool, please use it to expand your network of business contacts. Following big names in your field or smaller, more local companies relevant to you is going to increase your brand awareness and make you more authoritative. This is especially true if you have interesting or insightful things to tweet of course!

Now to the tweets! In this regard variety is the key. Tweeting obvious sales pitches with a link on the end will not get you as far as if you include a mix of photos and videos as well as text. Remember you are not writing for robots, you are writing for people, so act like one yourself! Make yourself human by engaging with your followers and answering their queries, it is a great way to build an audience.

Now you may be aware of ‘hashtags’ without actually knowing what they are intended for. Initially hashtags were introduced as a way to tag and link conversations that were going on beyond your network of Twitter followers. However, you will find a lot of people these days will tweet their own unique hashtag which serves no purpose apart from being a bit of a laugh. To use an example close to home, nobody is going to use the #davidenglishlovesit to search and indeed, nobody did. So, in your business, remember to put a hashtag relevant to your work on your tweet as a way to encourage conversation, perhaps from an unlikely source. You can discover relevant hashtags through tools such as RiteTag.

Make sure your Twitter profile is seen! On your site you should have links to your Twitter page which are clearly seen and easily accessible. You can also use the content within your site to gain attention from industry colleagues. If you have used a particular product or are reviewing them, send them a quick tweet with a link and this may get retweeted and again shared to a wider network.

Obviously these tips provide the basics in using Twitter effectively, although it is also true to say that there are a lot of brands out there that don’t know the basics. Getting your Twitter campaign off on a strong footing can give you a boost ahead of your competitors who aren’t aware or do not understand its potential. Then, once your Twitter following has grown enough, you can more closely engage with your followers to ask what they want and engage in the best form of market research.

Twitter’s sheer size and popularity can be a little intimidating to those businesses looking to get involved. However, these handy tips will give you a solid base for you to start your Twitter experience in the right fashion and begin building networks.

Make sure you as a business are as effective on Twitter as you possibly can be with this five point guide to starting an account.

Baffled by Twitter? We’re here to help. The sheer size and variety of Twitter may mean you struggle to know where to begin as a brand until you know how it works - and how it can work for you and your business.

Active engagement in social media can be vital for small businesses to build brand and tap into online consumer conversations. But how do you get started?

Looking for a more detailed social media plan? Get in touch and we'd be happy to continue the conversation.

In an age where the number of websites, and blogs in particular, has gone through the roof, Google has had to quickly adapt to suit these greater demands. Google is trusted by users to deliver them the website they need, while wading through the vast amount of information they don’t need. In keeping up with this service, the search engine giant has had to tweak its algorithms to ward off the bad actors among us.

Over the past decade or so, Google has been refining its search to allow positive SEO practices (‘white hat’) to prosper over negative tactics (‘black hat’). These measures can only be a good thing in the long term for respectable SEO practitioners, although it has undeniably caused some collateral damage to some small businesses.

Perhaps where the algorithm changes have seen the biggest impact is with smaller companies who have seen their search referrals tail off massively. With no training in the web or SEO, they might have been unaware that buying links, keyword stuffing or simply having links inbounded from sites of poor quality would be considered as ‘black hat’.

The key thing to realise here is that although they may not have understood it at the time, ignorance is now no longer a valid excuse. It is now their duty to stay up to date with how Google searches work if they are reliant on the online aspect of their business. You might also well argue that this is not their responsibility or area of expertise as business owners but if this is the case then the appointing of a digital marketing manager or external agency is paramount.

What Google has made abundantly clear from these recent updates is that it wants to reward websites that are creative, interesting and, most importantly, are designed for humans to view them and not algorithms. This should inspire you to create innovative content for your visitors rather than trying to lure them to your site under false pretenses.

This is said to exemplify Google’s growing appreciation of content marketing over more 'old school' SEO techniques, although these certainly can work in conjunction with one another. Practices such as guest posting will provide a diversity to your website and make it more appealing while keywords will still be needed to drive solid SEO. Good use of social media will also be of advantage to you, as a means of pushing this new content and a way of linking back to your site. In a simplistic sense though, Google is crediting those who pay close attention to their website and give the user what they need and punishing those who are lazy - a good message you would suggest!

Like all aspects of online marketing, you need to be willing and able to accept change if you’re to succeed. If you feel you are in need of any help with a change, please get in touch.

As the blogging business booms, Google are always looking to evolve their algorithms to stay up to date. So how can you look to grow your online presence without falling foul of the search engine's dreaded penalties?

Content marketing is at the forefront of modern thinking in digital marketing and in this post we take a look at its potential possibilities and pitfalls.

Pinterest is currently one of the most popular social networking sites, gaining a vast number of subscribers once it came out of beta development in the summer of 2012, and opened membership to all.

The idea is that users create ‘boards’ within their accounts and ‘pin’ images and other media (videos, for example) to their boards, which other people can follow and ‘repin’ if they like them too.

Pinterest encourages users to find these images, videos and articles on the web and to ‘give credit’ to the creators of these media items. Indeed, its own copyright page states this:

“Pinterest respects the intellectual property rights of others and we expect people on Pinterest to do the same.”

This doesn’t mean that everyone using Pinterest complies with this request, and credit is easily removed when pinning or re-pinning images.

Users are also encouraged to upload and pin images that they themselves have created, to avoid any copyright issues.

In Europe (and particularly in the UK) research suggests that the majority of Pinterest users are women though the opposite is true in the US, where Pinterest’s users are more representative of the demographic spread who use the internet as a whole.

Inevitably, with the plethora of wonderful images available online - many of which belong to professional photographers, artists and designers - these are going to be the ones attractive to ‘pinners’. We already have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (to name a few) to share our own attempts at photography, and images more suitable for friends and family than the world at large.

Here’s the catch. Pinterest doesn’t own the images posted there, and by carefully worded statements and legal notices, it avoids encouraging people to ‘steal’ images. But by the very nature of its business and purpose, it is in effect facilitating this process without being explicit about it.

It’s a valid argument that for the significant amount of publicity that brands and individual creatives could, and do, achieve from enthusiastic pinners, they are prepared to sacrifice some of their rights. But when you are a small business perhaps, or a sole trader earning your living from your creative work, you might be less inclined to take this line.

Whilst in the UK and US copyright is created along with the creative work - be that art, photography, text or music - it can sometimes be a lengthy and expensive business to prove who owns these works.

Some professional photographers and designers have decided that it’s too risky to leave their work on the site. It’s risky enough displaying work online at the best of times, but it is a necessity in this day and age. Unfortunately, unless you are prepared to sweep the internet for copies of your images and designs, it could still be difficult to stop people pinning them without giving you credit. In addition, a few conscientious (or cautious) Pinterest users have decided they don’t want to get inadvertently embroiled in a copyright battle, and deleted their own accounts.

However, whilst Pinterest has clearly put the onus on the user to take responsibility for crediting the owners of images, it is still possible to enjoy using the site both as a ‘pinner’ and as someone who owns copyright. Pinners should always credit from the original source - good practice in any situation when reproducing work or quoting; and the creators of visual work need to be careful not to publish their complete works online, to use watermarks, and low res images. Having your own website that establishes your ownership of the copyright will go a long way to protect your rights.

We at CORE are experts in managing issues such of this for our clients and partners. To find out more, get in touch with us through our contact form or tweet us @WeAre_Core.

While Pinterest is extremely popular both amongst individuals and brands as a visual sharing platform, potential issues around the copyright and use of images on the site still need to be considered carefully.

Staying legally secure online is vital for any business, so what are the rules surrounding copyright and images on the popular social sharing tool Pinterest?

In terms of creating a successful digital marketing plan for any company, audience engagement is key.

Being able to interact with customers and to get them to feel an association or bond with your brand will build a strong relationship and lead to great business. However, in order to foster such a relationship, providing interesting and entertaining content is vital. Getting creative as a company is a great (and fun!) way to create good content and will hopefully get your audience talking. Short videos are currently a very popular way to get your message across, and in this post we look at the movers and shakers in this niche.

The mobile app Vine has had 13 million downloads since its launch in January of this year (2013), and was last month made available for Android users having previously been solely compatible on iPhones and the iPod touch.

Its beauty is surely in its simplicity as, although its range of functions is limited as we shall explore, it is ridiculously easy to pick up. A quick registration sets you up with a profile and you’re on your way. In recording your video, simply use your thumb or finger on the screen to start filming. Releasing your thumb/finger will pause the video and allow you to create various stop motion-like film clips which last six seconds.

Although Vine has been used to create some beautiful and imaginative clips from the unlikeliest of sectors, it certainly has its limitations. For example, there is very little capacity in terms of editing as all you can really do is delete the vid and start again. You can’t delete frames and there is no ‘post production’ as it were.

There are also a few features, or lack thereof, which can get slightly irritating, including the fact that you are not able to switch between accounts on the mobile app. You must decide between a work profile or a personal profile, where one of which will surely cause problems for the other.

The initial success of Twitter-owned Vine saw Instagram, run by fellow social media juggernaut Facebook, attempt to up its game with the arrival of a video function. It sought to build upon Vine’s basic features and become more ‘production crew’ than app.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom heralded the move by stating that “we need to do to videos what we did to photos”. That they surely have done. The video service has a distinctly Instagram-like feel to it, using its classic filters and frames to help give your clip a different ambience. Additionally the Instagram ‘clips’ are over double the length of Vine vids, fifteen seconds to be precise, and they also feature the much-coveted ability to edit frames of your recording without having to delete the whole thing.

So what does this mean for the future of video sharing? Instagram video’s arrival has seen many predict the end for Vine or most certainly the end in terms of controlling a significant market share. The stats would seem to back this up with Instagram currently far out-sharing Vine on social networks, although it would seem that it has a natural advantage given that there are around ten times more Instagram users than Vine. This ability to ‘piggy back’ on the success of an already popular brand may muddy the waters and of course there is always an initial obsession with the new kids on the block.

But why can’t we have both? They do say variety is the spice of life and all that. Both products cater to different needs, for example a looping six second clip is much more suited to a funny vid while a clip using light filters and better editing is more in keeping with clips looking to maintain an artistic quality.

What really matters to you is what job it can do for your business and, in this regard, the greater the competition the better because it will result in the highest quality service.

UPDATE (October 2016: Vine announced that Twitter would be discontinuing the Vine app. It appears that indeed the emergence of Instagram Video might have precipitated its demise)

If content is king, what tools should I be looking at to get the most out of what I have as a brand? Video sharing has had a massive boom over the past six months and here we examine its two main players, Vine and Instagram video.

Social media marketing is big business right now, so how can you as a business tap into these online conversations?

We at CORE understand the ever-changing nature of content production and can help you use your social media channels to create the best business strategy for you.

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