Five on Friday: Leverage Trending Hashtags, Improving Google Search Results and More

Five on Friday this week explores ‘Trendsmap’ and ‘Google Search’ as well as building customer loyalty by nurturing employees.

As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products. Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for June 3rd, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.

1. Use Trendsmap to Discover Trending Hashtags

This worth-a-read post from the social marketing company SproutSocial delivers several good tips on using hashtags. My favorite is the Trendsmap tool (free option available, paid versions might be a good idea for news-oriented subscriptions). Trendsmap gives you an up-to-the-minute look at popular hashtags that you can incorporate into a post of your own to boost its visibility.

Tip: use trending hashtags wisely – if there isn’t some reasonable link between your post, the hashtag, and your subscription, don’t use it.

2. Insight into the Female Buyer’s Online Habits

This chart published by eMarketer with data from Fluent LLC may seem like information you already know, but take a closer look at the data and it may surprise you:

One in three women 65 or older looks to online customer reviews before buying.
While women under 29 are twice as likely to sign up for mobile notifications from brands and products than those 65+, fewer than 1 in 5 of them do so.
Except for propensity to follow a brand or sign up for mobile notifications, brand-related digital activities are not significantly different between women aged 18-29 and those between 45-65.

The takeaway? We’ve been online for over two decades now; don’t get stuck in legacy assumptions that can cut off your interaction with an older subscriber base.

3. Increase Customer Loyalty by Nurturing Employees

The interesting takeaway from this “basics of customer loyalty” post from allbusiness.com is the number of tips (fully four of the 10) that focus on employees. Included are suggestions to create a positive work environment, offer ongoing training and keep them abreast of product knowledge. What else can you do to help customers by helping your team? Here are a few of my own recommendations:

Increase company transparency. The more a team member understands about the company, the more they can help customers understand.

Encourage vacations. Enforcing – even indirectly – an atmosphere where leaving the building is frowned upon unless it’s on fire (in which case – take your laptop!), will wear people down, making them impatient with customer problems.

Listen to complaints. If they’re telling you, they might be telling customers.

4. Digital Tools Recommended – and Reviled – by Small Businesses

An interesting piece of research by Alignable; click on the partial chart at the right to see the whole thing.

5. Ten Best Ways to Improve Your Results on Google Search

This is a practical, action-oriented list of suggestions from entrepreneur.com that even a small business or novice in the ways of SEO can leverage. No time to read? Here’s the list: