Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ category
The Latest and Greatest: Getting Started with Pinterest
If you do Facebook, or keep up at all with what is going on with the world of social media, you probably know about Pinterest. Right now, it is the hottest thing going. Pinterest lets you set up virtual boards on which you pin images you collect by visiting Web pages, or by re-pinning items that other Pinterest users have already pinned. It’s a lot of fun, but our question here is: Does it have value from an Internet marketing standpoint? The answer is yes, although certain types of business may be a more natural fit for the Pinterest concept.
Pinterest is visual. It’s pictures. Therefore, any type of business that sells visually interesting products is a natural. For instance, I am somewhat of a collector of guitars and amps (much to my wife’s chagrin), so I have a board with pictures of items that are in my collection. If I had some kind of business related to guitars, such as selling vintage guitars, I could do this same thing to actually display what I had for sale. Sure, there are lots of places where you could display my inventory online, but why not go where the people are? Anything related to visual arts or crafts is also a natural fit for Pinterest.
As soon as I created my Pinterest account, I noticed that people started following me. Many were people that I knew from Facebook. Some were people that I had never heard of. I would advise that before you use Pinterest, you begin maintaining a Facebook account and build up a nice friend list. Then segue into Pinterest.
The trick to getting material into your Pinterest account is to install the Pin It button from the Pinterest interface on your bookmarks menu. Then you are on a page you would like to pin, you just click the button. Before you start pinning, you should set up your boards. Going back to our vintage guitar dealer example, maybe he has a Fender board, a Gibson board, and a Peavey board. Or maybe he just has one board for everything. Either way, he needs to have a board on which to place his pins. When he selects something to pin, he will choose a board on which to place it.
Like most of the social media sites, you should follow others as well as having people follow you. And you should pin interesting things from others’ boards onto your own. The more social you make it, the more exposure you will get.
If you are a service business, you may wonder if you have any use for Pinterest. The answer is yes. You don’t just have to pin “things.” You can pin content as well (the pin itself will still be a picture, but it will link to the content). But if you pin something like that, it should be interesting.
We’ve just skimmed the surface, but if you are the type that like to look for every advantage, you should give Pinterest a try. But my advice is to not just approach it from the standpoint of a way to promote your business, but really get into it. Have fun with it.
Getting Started with Facebook Contests
Have a contest is a great way to spread your brand on Facebook. However, it’s not as simple as just announcing that anyone who likes your business gets entered into a drawing. Facebook has a very strict set of rules about how contests should be conducted. You don’t want to risk having your account banned. So the best way to pull it off is to use a third party service already set up to do contests.
One that I have used recently is www.shortstack.com. It is easy to use and works great. But there are many of these now, so look at some different ones and find the one you like the best.
One advantage of using a third party service is that it can automatically store you contest entries into a database. Setting up a contest is a little bit complicated, but using a service like this will walk you through it, saving you a ton of time.
As far as the actual prize, it is certainly nice if it can be tied to what you actually sell. If you sell some kind of product or service that people would really like to win, and you can legally give it away, then you can make that the prize. Sometimes it’s not so obvious, however. So you may have to just pick some kind of prize that would be desirable to your market. Maybe give away a trip or an ipad. You get the idea.
If you are busy running your business (aren’t we all?), it is easy for your social accounts to get stale. Hosting a contest is one way to get people liking your account, and it gives you something to talk about. It keeps things moving.
Contact Work Media if you could use some help with your Internet marketing campaign.
How to Increase the Number of Twitter Users You Can Follow
Twitter’s 110% rule (that says that the number of people you can follow is a maximum of the greater of 2000 or 110% of the number of people you are following) creates a problem for marketers. The top way to generate new followers of your own is to follow others. One way to increase their followers without bumping up against this limit is to maintain a ratio of followers to followees of around 1:1. But this is easier said than done unless you have some specific strategies in place to manage it.
Refollow is a fantastic, free online service that allows you to dismiss users from your Twitter account in order to manage that ratio. The tool lets you view all of the Twitter users who you are following, those who are following you, as well as groups of users based on particular criteria. They are presented in a grid of icons which display information about each user.
Unless you are already a celebrity or of a status where people are naturally going to follow you, you are going to have to manage your following list. The first thing you are going to have to do is eliminate those users you follow who do not follow you back (not counting people you genuinely enjoy reading). Refollow makes that process easy by showing you exactly who is not following you back and allowing you to mass-unfollow them all at once.
Another option is simply to buy users. There are many options available for doing this, so I won’t recommend any particular one here. It seems a bit unseemly. And the practice does violate the concept of using Twitter as a platform to communicate with those you find interesting. However…business is business, and if this is something you need to do to get past the 110% limit in order to keep growing your account, then it is a viable option.
If you can create a genuine buzz within the Twitter universe about yourself based on the quality or entertainment value of your updates, then you might not even have to worry about any of these options. If people flock to your account because they are genuinely interested in what you have to say, there will be no need to manipulate the ratio of followers to those you are following.
Most likely, however, at least in the beginning, you will have to take some specific steps to keep that ratio in line to grow your follower base much past 2000.
Don’t Be Lazy with Your Social Media Marketing
Jerry Work here. I have returned to the business of finishing our next book, on the subject of social media marketing. It has been 90% written for a couple of months; I just haven’t had the enthusiasm for the project to finish. But I’ve rededicated myself to getting it done and out to the public.
It’s funny…as I read through what I’ve written, I keep saying to myself “man, that’s a good idea…I should do that…” You see, I’ve spent a ton of time this year studying social media, experimenting with Twitter and whatnot, but then when things get too busy around the office, I tend to drop it so that I can concentrate on getting the work done.
But it can’t be that way.
You have GOT to be systematic if you are going to use social media as a marketing strategy. If you post on Twitter once a week, that is going to do absolutely nothing. If you update Facebook once a month, you might as well be invisible. These things have got to be done every day.
I have blogged quite a bit here and in my Twitter marketing blog about automating certain tasks so that your accounts stay updated even when you don’t manually update them yourself. But I’ve discovered something else about myself that I think is probably applicable to most people: once you stop doing something, it is difficult to start back up. So for the last few weeks, my Twitter account has pretty well been on auto-pilot. Sure, it is good because I have kept it going, but social networking is MUCH more effective when you involve yourself…when you read what others around you are saying…when you are part of the community.
So be better than I have been lately. Get your systems in place to automate your accounts, but make sure you set aside a little bit of time each day to log into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever you’re into, and update your account. Respond to what some other users are saying. Look for new friends.
Just do it!
Updating Twitter with TweetLater and TwitterFeed
The deeper we dig into the Twitter world, the more different ways we are finding to take advantage of it. I (this is Jerry) have to admit that I am much more intrigued by Twitter than I am with Facebook. I have yet to really realize the benefit of Facebook, although admittedly part of it is that I just haven’t put that much effort into it. Part of it is time. I do all of our social media work, and after taking care of our clients, I have fairly limited time for self-promotion. But it is also that I just don’t “get” Facebook like I get Twitter. Twitter is an incredibly simple concept, yet remarkably powerful in the things you can do with it.
I think the best way for a business to manage a Twitter account is with a combination of automation and manual posting. For automation, my number one tool hands down is Tweet Later. I really can’t do Twitter without it now (the pro version, not the free version which is much more limited in what it can do). However, one issue with using Tweet Later to automate your account is that you pre-program your messages, so the tweets that originate from Tweet Later are not really tied to events actually happening.
That’s why I have started combining Tweet Later automation with automatic posts from TwitterFeed. The purpose of TwitterFeed is to let you stream your own blog to your Twitter account. That is a nice feature, but what I have started doing is creating an RSS feed based on Google alerts, and then feeding that into TwitterFeed to in turn update my Twitter account with news items. So now, my account is automatically updated with a combination of pre-programmed messages about my industry, along with Google news results. And of course I do a fair amount of manual posting as well.
If you are active with Twitter, it can keep your name in front of a lot of people. And if some of those people like what you have to say and start retweeting your messages, then there is a powerful viral effect.
I have devoted many hours the last few weeks to a study of Twitter. If you would like to learn along with me, I invite you to check out my blog devoted to the subject, The Twitter Marketing Blog, at www.thetwittermarketingblog.com.
Social Media: Walking Down a Hallway with Lots of Doors
There is a classic business metaphor that associates being in business with walking down a hallway with lots of doors. Just walking down the hallway (the state of conducting some kind of business) will reveal opportunities that you could not see until you walked down the hall. In other words, moving forward with some kind of business plan will cause you to meet people and come upon situations that may change the course of your business. That is fine, however, because it means that you are recognizing opportunities that you would not have seen if you had not taken action.
The concept of using social media to promote your business falls very nicely in line with this idea. Sites like Facebook and Twitter will allow you to make a social (sort-of) connection with many people you would not have otherwise known. And that is where opportunities come from. The more involved you are with these sites, the better your chance of using them as a tool for opportunity creation.
However, your chance of creating opportunity is better if you focus your friend/follower generating activities on those with some type of connection to your industry for geographic market. For instance, a bankruptcy lawyer in Memphis would be well served to follow and be followed by residents and business owners in Memphis. When one of those people needs help with a bankruptcy issue, they will know who to contact.
It is also necessary to keep your eyes open. If you operate your account in such a way as to get as many friends or followers as you can but you never read what those people have to say, you will not be aware when the possibility arrives to offer assistance or propose business alliances. If the number of people you follow is small, then you might be fine just using the default twitter interface. However, as your accounts grow, it can quickly become difficult to keep up with what is going on. Therefore, it is highly advisable to use a software solution to help you manage your social media accounts.
There are several on the market, and I have spent time finding a solution that works well for me. It would be a good idea for you to do the same. The one I like the best is TweetLater (http://trytweetlater.com), which automates many functions of managing a Twitter campaign, such as posting tweets, sending direct messages, and searching for new relevant users to follow. A good application for just keeping up with what people are saying is TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com), which lets you view your Facebook friend updates and Twitter follower updates in the same interface.
New Direction for Work Media
Work media is enjoying our new office located in downtown Dickson. Our productivity is up and our travel time is way down. We can all get to the office in 15 minutes or less, which uses more time to spend researching Internet Marketing strategies and applying them to our clients accounts. If any of you ever find yourself in Dickson (about 1/2 hour drive west of Nashville), we invite you to stop by for a visit. We are in the old Ragan arcade on main street.
We’ve been getting really heavy into social media and video. We have begun recording a lot of video footage, including short 12 second video four 12 seconds/twitter. Of loading videos to 12 seconds has a definite SEO advantage, in that it can result in the creation of a lot of web pages with a keyword links pointing to your main site. This is somewhat of an advanced strategy that could have a powerful long-term impact on a search engine optimization campaign.
Combining video, social media, and content distribution is definitely the state of the art in search engine marketing. We invite you to contact us today to talk about creating and implementing this type of marketing campaign for your business.
By the way, if you’re into Twitter, you should check out our Twitter blog, http://twitterforbusiness.blogspot.com.
By the way one more time, I invite you to check out our 12seconds page, http://12seconds.tv/channel/lawfirmseo. As the name implies, this particular channel is intended to discuss law firm marketing, but it pretty much all applies to any type of business.
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.