Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ category
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.
Ping.fm for Updating Social Networking Sites
I’ve begun using an online tool called Ping.fm to manage my social networking activities. I have looked at a number of different such applications, but i really like this one. It has a pretty easy to use interface, and it works with a lot of different platforms.
To use it, first you need accounts set up at a few social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and maybe a blog or two. Then you create an account at Ping.fm and add your “networks” by telling the application what sites you want to manage and what your logins for the sites are.
Once that is done, rather than logging into individual web sites to update blogs and statuses and whatnot, you can just type a message into a textbox at the Ping.fm site and it automatically posts it to the various other sites you have configured.
Another interesting feature is that you can also use the application to update your various social networking sites via a mobile device. So if you are away from your computer but have an idea for something to post to your social networking sites, you can just submit the post to Ping.fm via your phone.
This is a concept that I encourage you to explore because it is a high leverage concept. I am a huge fan of writing something once and using it in many different places (when done ethically), and Ping.fm and similar services make that process much easier.
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.
Return to Squidoo
I logged into Squidoo yesterday to build a new lens (“lens” being Squidoospeak for a web page) for a client. It had been a while since I had logged in, which isn’t good but isn’t necessarily bad either. One of the great things about Squidoo is all of the modules it provides for building your lenses that update themselves automatically. So you can build a lens that will continue to show new content every day even if you don’t do anything to it for months or years.
Anyway…I logged in to build a new lens and noticed some major changes to the Squidoo interface that make it much quicker to add modules and align modules on your page. Last year, I spent a couple of weeks setting up Squidoo lenses and it was very slow process because of what was required to add and re-order modules. Now that that process is much quicker, Squidoo is much better.
So why should you set up pages in Squidoo? It’s been a while since we’ve talked about it, so here is a super quick refresher. Squidoo is a social networking site founded by Seth Godin that Google really loves. Often, a page on Squidoo that pertains to your subject area will rank quicker and higher than your own web site. So links from Squidoo carry a lot of weight.
You should incorporate Squidoo as part of your social networking/content distribution campaign. If you publish a blog, you should use the RSS module to stream your blog posts to your Squidoo lenses. And use some of the news publishing modules to automatically keep them updated with news about your industry.
The Squidoo teams seems to be trying to make the site easier to use, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, now is a great time.