Archive for the ‘social media’ category
Using Groups to Organize Your Twitter Account with TweetDeck
Once your Twitter account gets up to a couple thousand followers, it can be difficult to manage. Unless you’re rich and don’t have anything better to do, you can’t really sit around all day and do nothing but read tweets. However, checking out what the people you follow are saying is sort-of the whole point of Twitter’s existence.
A program for organizing your account so you can keep up with those you find interesting or useful is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a client side program that presents your Twitter information in an efficient, organized way using columns. By default, the tweets from all of your friends are listed in a column on the left-hand side of the screen (although columns can be moved around however you want). The next column lists tweets that mention your user name. The third column lists direct messages. The last column, by default, shows TweetDeck recommendations, which I found to be a waste of space. I use that column to build out groups.
If you take the steps to build up a large list of people you follow (and who follow you), there are going to be many people that you’re really not that interested in reading. Likewise, there are going to be some people who you really want to keep up with. The way to account for this is to place those you really want to read into groups.
I have several groups set up in my account – one for those who post about legal marketing, one for those who post about affiliate marketing, etc. This lets me track posts on specific subjects from specific users, rather than having to dig through thousands of tweets that I really don’t care about.
You may choose to use groups differently, instead just grouping anyone you find interesting regardless of their line of work or the nature of their tweets. That is fine. The main thing is just to find SOME way to keep up with your most followees, rather than just having a big unorganized mess.
How to Use Your Blog and Twitter Account to Keep Facebook Updated Automatically
Using a tool like Ping.fm, you can integrate your blog, your Twitter account, and your Facebook account. We’re talking about dynamically combining content from multiple sources into content for a third or more web page.
Here is a hypothetical example.
Let’s say I run an Internet marketing company in Nashville…wait a minute, that’s not so hypothetical is it? Anyway, I update my company’s blog every Tuesday and Friday. A couple of times per day, I also update our Twitter account. Assuming it takes me one hour per blog post and five minutes per tweet, that would represent a total time investment of just under three hours.
At the moment, I am only updating my blog and my Twitter account for those three hours. With a little ingenuity, I can also keep a major social networking site such as Facebook updated with very little additional time.
With an application like Ping.fm, I can have my Facebook status updated every time I post a new tweet. Taking it a step further, I can use the Facebook Notes application to update my Facebook account every time I update my blog. So now, for those same three hours, I am not only updating my blog and Twitter, I am also updating my Facebook page.
One problem is that just having a Facebook account doesn’t do us any good if we don’t have any friends in the account. So I may need some additional time to periodically log into Facebook and search for new friends. I could even automate that part using a tool like Facebook Blaster. But I would still want to periodically log into my Facebook account to check things out. You never really want to automate something and then just forget about it.
Since I’m using Ping.fm, I could also choose to set up some more social media pages and have them update every time I update my blog. In this case, it will be important to separate blogs from update sites using groups. Otherwise, I will end up with a bunch of extremely short blog posts with no titles. I have made that mistake before and it looks really bad.
So, the whole point of this exercise: whereas before I put in the time and only managed to update my firm’s blog and Twitter account, I can now update the blog, Twitter account, AND a Facebook account.
Meltdown on Twitter Street
This weekend, it seems that many thousands of Twitter users had their accounts suspended for no reason. Twitter’s excuse is that there was a “spamcloud” that had to be dealt with…
So, my first question is: what the heck is a spamcloud?
My second question is: is the only way to deal with it really shutting down the accounts of thousands of innocent users?
Twitter may just be a victim of its own success. I’m sure it is difficult managing and scaling an application that is growing as rapidly as it is. But come on…shouldn’t Twitter have a plan in place for managing things like this? I think Twitter risks driving away many users if it continues to operate in this fashion.
This whole episode highlights an important point about Internet marketing:
You should focus your efforts on driving traffic to Web properties that you own. Otherwise, you are at someone else’s mercy. Do you own your Facebook page? No. Facebook does. Do you own your LinkedIn account? No, LinkedIn does. Do you own your Twitter page? Nope. Twitter does.
What do you own? You own your web site.
So if you’ve spent all your marketing time and energy promoting your Twitter page, and Twitter suspends your account (like it probably did this weekend), then you are stuck. But if you devote your energy toward getting people to your main web site, then you have more control and more freedom. You are not at anyone’s mercy (except maybe your hosting company).
I do think you should promote your Twitter page and your Facebook page and whatever other social media accounts you have, but first and foremost, promote your own web site.
Maybe next time you can avoid the meltdown on Twitter Street.
If you are having a hard time with this social networking stuff (or anything else related to online marketing), contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or www.WorkMedia.net.
For maximum control of your Twitter account, I advise the use of Tweet Later, which you can try for free at www.TryTweetLater.com.
Getting Organized with Your Social Networking
I have spent a good bit of time the last week using Excel to sketch out a social networking management system. The resulting spreadsheet will be a tool that we will give away for free for use of our readers. And the concept will then be carried forward into an online database-driven application that will be used for our own purposes and our clients’. But the exercise has been very helpful at helping me think through the process of how a social networking campaign should be organized.
First off, I consider content distribution to be a major part of online social networking. If you leave this part out, and just concentrate on meeting people online, then you are not taking advantage of the Web’s ability to spread your name and marketing message. So writing blogs and articles and distributing that content should be an integrated part of what you do. The system I am setting up makes the assumption that you will be doing this.
Social networking is one of those things that tends to happen haphazardly, as time permits, whenever you think about it. It can be done much more effectively if you create a monthly social networking/content distribution schedule that tells you exactly when you should be doing things and what you should be doing.
To begin with, I suggest you create a simple calendar of when blog posts should be posted and articles written. Aim for eight blog posts per month and three articles. If you can do more than eight blogs, that’s fantastic, but a minimum of eight is sufficient. In a year’s time that is nearly a hundred blog posts, which is a lot of content. Three articles in a month may be aggressive, but try.
When you lay out your blogging and article writing schedule, go ahead and write out an idea for each blog post in advance, and create groupings of two or three blog posts in a row that elaborate on the same general topic. Then for each of those topic groupings of blog posts, specify a date to write an article that combines the information from those blog posts. This way, rather than trying to always think of a topic for an article from scratch, you can just use the content you create in the process of blogging as the basis for those articles.
Just doing the above things will go a long way toward giving your content distribution efforts more focus, but we’re not done. In my next blog post we will continue talking about scheduling and hit on some other functions that should be included in your calendar.
Work Media is here to help with your social networking, content distribution and search engine marketing. If it involves driving traffic to a web site, we’re into it. Give us call at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.
Twitter: Don’t Bore Your Prospects
Today I begin Twittering with renewed enthusiasm. Last night I even updated my profile and image. I’ve got a yellow post it note stuck to the side of my monitor to remind me to update Twitter. If you don’t update, then the whole exercise is pointless.
Are you on the Twitter yet? It may seem like an unproductive use of your time, and I can’t really blame you. But if you ain’t on the Twitter, you got a problem.
Here’s the lowdown. Twitter really can help you build up an online network of people who are interested in what you have to say; who can influence events in your life; who can recommend your products or services to others. It is a legitimate business tool. And it’s free (not counting the time you spend actually doing it).
So start today. Go set up an account if you don’t have one, and make your page look interesting. Upload an image of yourself so you don’t have the default brown loop-looking thing as your image. Fill out the fields on your profile page. People want to learn who you are.
Your Twitter posts should: contain relevant keywords; be industry specific; and be interesting to read. If you can make them funny, that’s even better. You want to entertain as much as possible.
I’m a professional search engine marketer, but I’m a newbie at using Twitter. But if I’ve learned anything in the short time I have been using Twitter, it’s that you’ve got to be interesting!
By the way, you can look me up on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jwork.
Get Those Social Networking Profiles Set Up!
Take the time to set up your profiles on social networking sites. I know, I know, it takes forever…but it must be done. And it is my suggestion that you have lots of such accounts. It is not sufficient just to have a LinkedIn profile. You should create accounts at Squidoo and LinkedIn and set up good profiles there. You also need accounts at the major article directories like EzineArticles.
To create all these accounts and set up profiles, you will need to devote at least a half day to it, if not the whold day.
This is the kind of work that would be good to hire someone else to do. I suggest you create a document that has your bio, contact information, links, and any other information you may want shown on your profiles, and then find an intelligent young person to do the work for you. Paying a kid $10 per hour to do it is a bargain compared to using your own time, which you probably value a lot more than that.
Do people really look at other people’s profiles on social networking sites? Absolutely. So don’t blow an opportunity to brand and market yourself to people who are potential sources of business or leads.
Social Marketing – Keep it Interesting
I (Jerry) have been heavy, heavy into article marketing this year. It has become my personal favorite way of increasing link count. However, I am beginning to experience what I believe may be some resistance on the part of Google to rank sites with a large number of links primarily from article-related sites.
You gotta mix it up. In an attempt to do just that, I have also been doing some social bookmarking. But I have to admit, the social bookmarking component has not worked quite as well. The problem there is that for social bookmarking to be really effective, you need lots of other people to bookmark your site BECAUSE THEY REALLY LIKE IT and think others would enjoy it as well. So ultimately, it’s out of your hands.
What can you do about this? It’s simple, really, although also quite complex. You have to create content that is REALLY interesting. Just being a source of useful information is not enough. You need a gimmick. A hook. Something that makes people laugh, or gasp, or something…you need a reaction!
Simply bookmarking your own home page will not do it. Your site needs to be loaded with interesting content. You may not even want the content on your front page if it detracts from your core marketing message. This is only something you’ll use as a hook so that people want to bookmark your site.
I’m not at all slowing down on article marketing. We have seen fantastic results, and it has benefits beyond search rankings, such as direct-click-throughs and credibility. But if you engage in article marketing, you should supplement it with other link building strategies.
If you need some help coming up with interesting ways to build a catalog of links to your site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Breaking Out of Our Shell
For a blogger, I don’t get out much. Most successful bloggers spend all kinds of time reading other blogs, posting, being active in blog communities…and I don’t know how they do it. How the heck do you do that and still get any work done? We still don’t visit many blogs and get into that community stuff too much, simply because of the time required. But we have started doing something that moves us in that direction that i think may be of value to you.
We’ve been going to “answer” sites and responding to questions that deal with search engine marketing topics. A couple of good examples of the types of sites I’m talking about are:
and
To answer questions on either site, you have to have an account. Signing up doesn’t take long, but you might want to spend some time working on your profile just in case people reading your answers want to find out more about you.
You may or may not receive any boost in your search engine rankings from these sites. Linkedin, for example, uses a redirect for your web site link, so it’s not a link straight to your site. And Yahoo! inserts a nofollow attribute in links contained in answers. But with Yahoo!, we have seen many links contained in answers appear in search engine lists of links to a site, so we think you are getting some value there.
Even if you receive no search engine ranking boost, you will expose your expertise to people looking for help in your area, so chances are good that you will receive some traffic. It’s just another form of on-line networking. You’ve got to get your name out there, and answering questions is a good way to do it.
You do need to be careful not to use the answer sites simply for promotional purposes. Your accounts will be banned quick if you do that. If you’re going to do it, you need to look for questions for which you can honestly provide some insight, and type out complete, well-written responses.
If you could use some help implementing a search engine optimization or pay per click management campaign for your business, give us a call at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Astounding Results with Social Bookmarking
For one of our clients we are currently promoting, we are doing a lot of linking – pretty standard stuff for a search engine optimization campaign. As part of this process, we are doing a fair amount of social bookmarking of our client’s web pages. We started with del.icio.us, probably the top social bookmarking web site.
We bookmarked every page of the site and tagged each page with a static set of keywords plus keywords specific to that page. Within a couple of days, our main social bookmarks page about those topics was near the top of Google’s rankings for some of the keywords – actually above the client we’re promoting! So while that’s not exactly what we’re ultimately trying to achieve, it proves the point that search engines place a lot of stock in information that is categorized via social bookmarking. And in the long run it will help our client rise in the rankings. Although, if someone clicks our link, they will be presented with nothing but links to our client’s site – a win, win situation.
Another point is that by bookmarking our client’s site, we exposed it to lots of other people who use the same social bookmarking site. If some of them bookmark our client’s pages as well, then that strengthens our client’s position. And del.icio.us is only one of probably dozens of similar sites, all of which can be used to promote a web site about a particular subject.
So is you have not socially bookmarked your own site’s web pages, we strongly recommend it. And have all of your employees sign up for their own accounts and do it as well.
If you need some help promoting your site in the social bookmarking sites (or anywhere else), contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.