Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Felicity, Both can have an impact. What matters is how well you can achieve goals. I could probably get better results from SEO than Social Media, but only because I don't specialise in SM. Get someone who does, and the outcome could be totally different. I guess the answer to this is where you feel you can have the most impact as both areas have the ability to achieve the desired results for you. -Andy

Hi Jess, you are using the correct dimensions (which are listed at the link posted by Trenton above): Smallest size: 480x270 pixels Largest Size: 2120x1192 pixels Are you able to post a couple of links to these pages so I can get a true picture of what is going on? (Or links to blurred out, screenshots, mockups, etc if privacy is a concern.) Or has this issue been resolved? Would love an update, thanks! Christy

True Social Metrics offers some free tools. Jen writes more about how we use it at Moz at http://moz.com/blog/social-engagement-metrics-that-matter.

I would suggest not worrying about them. You can block and report them, but that probably won't do much. I took a quick look at the accounts, and I didn't see them copy anything recently. I would suggest focusing on metrics that are more impactful than followers, such as relative engagement rates. You have 1 million followers, but on you're only getting a few replies and 20-40 retweets, which means for every 1,000 followers your amplification rate is only 0.04. You can read more about this here.

Well, I would make the company page be the rel=publisher and the author page to be rel=author and would share in the way that I proposed. In this way, everyone gets some authorship I think. Does anyone else have some insight on this?

Thanks for the recommendations Mike. We are considering GA Premium among others and Chartbeat too.

Hi Dario, You should prefer the account with the better reach to a responsive crowd. There are a lot of fake accounts nowadays so if you are looking for people to help you promote your brand, go with someone active and interacts, someone that can actually get you results. So yeah, Vadim said it best. Authority is superior.

Hi Jef, The best thing to do, is have a read here. The hreflang option would serve you nicely here. You won't need a separate G+ account for each either. Having the same author is absolutely fine but just make sure you reference each of the sites as a contributor to that site. Google understands, and handles, multiple language situations pretty well - just make sure you put in the necessary code for them. -Andy

No but I've heard of it. I tried their Ninjagram program and it seemed like an okay tool, although I was quickly blocked by Instagram. Would be interested to see how this turns out. I think they have a free trial that you can use for a few hours.

I would think no, because you are not actually giving money to them. These kind of promotions are quite popular, I think if they were against Twitter TOS they would have been mentioned by now. (In reality isn't it basically the same as advertising on Twitter?) But also apps like rafflecopter are allowed which is in a sense buying follwers as well.

I would agree focus on one twitter account. The only reason you might want a second twitter account is from something like customer service. However very often you will find that this just leads to confusion and customers will mention your marketing twitter account rather than your customer service twitter account. As for the tone of the account that is something that you have to work out on your own. You tone on twitter should reflect your brand. But remember it is a social medium and so generally the tone is more conversational. Hope that this helps.

Thanks Vadim for your advise!. I have implemented your recommendation. BTW it is really easy to delete a G+ profile. The only bad news is that you have to re-upload your Youtube videos to the new account.

Thanks Michael. This looks great. A very similar tool to Buffer. Regards Gary

Since it is shares and likes in a matching number for each page it sounds like the probably bought a service from a site like Fiverr to give them a certain amount of shares, follows, re-tweets, etc. They could also be using a program like Synnd to automatically get social shares. Either way, I wouldn't spend much time worrying about it.

I took a look at it, and the Facebook page is definitely indexed for both your keywords. I did a search for both of the keyword and site:facebook.com. It's just not ranking very highly for the keyword anymore. I would focus on making sure your content is solid. It also looks like Google may be biasing against Facebook pages for these keywords. Since it's a service, you're in local SEO territory, and you'll want to focus most on ranking well locally over anything else.

Here are a few ideas: Create a nice landing page and drive traffic to it from native ad platforms on Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In.... Partner with "groups" on Facebook, Linked-In and G+ to offer their members free business cards e.g. https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104764329569377268904/stream/7596df91-7935-400c-9e8c-479f3b0a403b?hl=en Write guest by-line articles for small business sites about how to go off on your own and start a design business on a budget, and include references to your landing page for free business cards All of this assumes that the landing page has some sort of pre-qualifying questions since you mentioned "select" graphic designers and illustrators. I think partnering with design groups to offer their members free cards would be a good way to go. You can find groups of designers on just about very major social media / networking platform on the web. You can even try local groups from Meetup.com and elsewhere. You could partner with a design conference, or a graduate school... You could buy placement in a design-related newsletter, etc...

Cool stuff, thanks guys!

Glad to know that works, Andy! I was considering that as a last ditch effort. Thanks!

Especially on Google+ you often see that people write a short enticing description which encourages people to read the post in the description. This is something you could do. A summary of the story however makes people not want to read the full story since they already read all the information in the summary.

Right... and I bet that they would be really embarrassed to say who is "liking them".... or maybe they would spin the explanation into some real BS.