Social Marketing Quick Tip #6 – Twitter Traffic
October 18, 2010 by Lisa Santos · 1 Comment
Marketing on Twitter is very easy, but you must be aware that it doesn’t always yield the desired result unless it is done properly.
Twitter marketing has to be approached in a completely different way than other forms of advertising because Twitter limits the size of posts to just 140 characters.
This means you must keep your posts very short, you can’t ramble on endlessly. You have to get to the point and do it in a way that gains your follower’s interest and gets them to click!
It’s a very good idea to read your Twitter page daily and respond to messages that your followers post. By interacting with them directly, you can establish friendships. This is very important, because your followers can “re-tweet” (RT) your messages to their own followers, potentially allowing you to reach a wider audience.
12 Favorite and Little Known Tips for LinkedIn
July 15, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
Most business professionals are on LinkedIn at this point. LinkedIn tells us that:
• LinkedIn has over 70 million members in over 200 countries.
• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and
about half of our members are outside the U.S.
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.
To me that states clearly that if you have almost ANY kind of business and are prospecting, LI will be a good resource for you. But just setting up a profile and dabbling once a week or so is not going to do much for your prospecting efforts. Below are a few tips that not many folks know about, but are powerful techniques for increasing your visibility and maximizing that “inbound marketing” that Social Media is known for.
1. Create 3 saved searches. If you are doing a search on a company, person, industry or whatever, save your searches. At the top where you see the number of records in your search you’ll see a “save this search” button – you get 3 if you are at the basic level. LI will send you a weekly email, if you want, to get updates to your search.
2. Recommendations are important, so ask for them. But make it easy. I first call or email my contact and ask if they will recommend me. If so, write the recommendatíon yourself – so you are sure that you are sending the right message. Be sure to talk about the problems you solved – that’s really the point, isn’t it?
3. Use the Question and Answer area to gain more visibility on the Internet. On the question that you answer you will see a “share this” with a drop down menu. You can email your network, Digg it, Bookmark the question on Delicious, or use the link provided in your answer and link to one of your blog posts, or somewhere else on your site to pull in traffic.
4. Join groups that are in line with your business, your objectives or your hoped for job. Fish where the fish are. The more “on target” the group, the more valuable the content they provide, and the networking opportunities will be.
5. Use groups to expand your network, but be selective. In the groups tabs, you will see “Groups Directory”. Select that and on the next page use Search Groups, selecting “other” from the drop down categories menu. Join the groups that interest you. Once you are a member, you will have access to the members in that group. Try connecting with the ones that make sense. You might evaluate based on the size of their network, the type of company or industry they are in or how much interaction they have had with the group.
6. Did you know you can export your connections? Go to “Contacts.” Then “Connections. ” At the bottom of your Connections box is “Export Connections. ” Export the connections and import them into your preferred address book. Do this frequently so you are consolidating all of your contacts in one spot (might be Outlook, Act, Salesforce).
7. Refer to both the LinkedIn Learning Center and their blog. The Learning Center is full of great tutorials and the blog has info on updated and new features with full explanations.
8. For better and more valued networking, when you invite someone to join your network, don’t use the canned LinkedIn message. Say something about who you are and why you want to connect with that person.
9. To really maximize your profile, find one or two LinkedIn specialists (Google that phrase, or check Amazon for authors) and look up their profile. Study carefully and learn by example.
10. Be creative about how you use the Answers section. It can be used to ask for solutions to problems, for resources, for vendors, for processes. But it can also be used to find good connections, or find other groups you may want to join, to deliver information on your products or services, IF it provides an answer to the question. Sometimes you’ve got the perfect solution!
11. You can share a group with your connections – more value added to your community. When you are in a specific group, on the Overview tab you will see an option to “share group” and you can send an email to 50 of your connections.
12. Don’t hop over the “People You May Know” suggestions that appears in the upper right corner of your home page. Expand the box and start connecting with people on an ongoing basis. This is a great way to widen your circle.
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for almost any social media objective – branding, lead generation, or job searching. Invest some time in learning the finer points – you will be glad you did.
About The Author
Elyse Tager is a social media strategist and founder of Elymedia. Elyse develops effective marketing strategies to help the small business grow significantly. Want to learn more about growing your business with Social Media? Sign up for Elyse’s free introductory teleseminar available at => www.elymedia.com.
Twitter and Privacy: History Doesn’t Retweet
July 1, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
Ever had a case of the *tipsy tweets*?
You know what I’m talking about. The type of tweets you’d not post to Twitter sober but that seem highly amusing after a couple of alcoholic beverages. The ones you rush to delete on Monday morning in a coffee-induced panic when you remember what or who you tweeted. Yeah those.
Well, the next time your fingertip hovers over the send button after you’ve had a few, you might want to think twice about letting it make contact with the keyboard.
It turns out that the Library of Congress has decided to digitally archive EVERY public tweet that has been posted to Twitter since the site launched in 2006. With 50 million tweets processed by Twitter every day, that adds up to billions of messages.
The Announcement
The news came in mid April, first via the Library of Congress’s own Twitter account and then via public announcement during Twitter’s first Chirp conference for developers. This was followed up by blog posts from both the Library and Twitter.
Why Archive Tweets?
So why the interest in digitally archiving tweets and is it really necessary? Staff at the Library of Congress think so:
“Twitter is part of the historical record of communication, news reporting, and social trends – all of which complement the Library’s existing cultural heritage collections. It is a direct record of important events such as the 2008 U.S. presidential election or the *Green Revolution* in Iran. It also serves as a news feed with minute-by-minute headlines from major news sources such as Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. At the same time, it is a platform for citizen journalism with many significant events being first reported by eyewitnesses,” says Matt Raymond, the Library of Congress’s Director of Communications.
“Individually tweets might seem insignificant, but viewed in the aggregate, they can be a resource for future generations to understand life in the 21st century.”
Don’t Panic
Now before you panic about your entire Twitter history being laid bare to a grubby public, you should know that there are some protections in place.
Twitter has insisted there be at least a six-month window between the original date of a tweet and its date of availability for internal library use, non-commercial research, public display and preservation by the Library of Congress. Private account information and deleted tweets will not be part of the archive. Neither will linked information such as pictures and URLs.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington also doesn’t see a problem with it:
“I think folks understand that whatever they post on Twitter is meant to be searchable”, says their senior counsel John Verdi.
“I don’t see a big issue here.”
That might change, he says, if the US government tried to identify individuals through their tweets or by cross checking user tweets with their information from other federal databases.
Personally, I can see this happening unless further protections are put in place. It’s probably happening every day.
Gift Wrapped
It’s important to note that the Library did not purchase the archive. It was gifted from Twitter and the original legal document outlining the donation is publicly available via PDF.
“Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation. Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created”, says Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in their official blog post about the donation.
“Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world – from historic elections to devastating disasters.”
“It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research.”
About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States and it is the largest library in the world, regularly researched by government staff, law enforcement agencies, law firms, authors, scholars, scientists, students and academics. The Library receives more than 1.75 million readers and visitors annually and employs a staff of more than 3,600. According to Twitter, it’s a logical home for their archive.
What Does it All Mean?
So with billions of tweets added to the federal archive, how can we expect the data to be used? With Twitter’s entire history archived, it shouldn’t be long before we see tweets being used as evidence in criminal trials and various lawsuits.
Tweets have already been cited in defamation cases such as the one between 25 year-old Chicago resident Amanda Bonnen and her landlord, Horizon Group Management LLC. Following a disagreement with Horizon Group about mold allegedly found in her apartment, Bonnen posted on her public Twitter account:
“Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay”, to which Horizon Group responded with a defamation case to the tune of USD 50,000.
Although a Google-cache of her now deactivated account shows she had just 17 followers, Horizon claimed Bonnen’s tweet severely damaged their good name because it was published “worldwide”. Ironically, the publicity the case receíved probably did more damage to Horizon’s public image than Bonnen’s limited tweet. The case was thrown out due to lack of specific context in the tweet, but it does set an interesting precedent for other potential cases.
Whatever the legal and privacy implications, knowing your tweets are being preserved for historical significance and stored in the same building as priceless documents like the Declaration of Independence, should be somewhat humbling.
Who knows, future generations may one day point to your “OMG you guys! @justinbieber just walked into @starbucks!” tweet with the same awe reserved for George Washington’s copy of the US Constitution.
About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
Why Adopt Social Media Marketing?
June 1, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
Blogging, tweeting, friending. Odd sounding verbs, these. Not sure you’ll find them in the “verb” category in the dictionary ~ at least not yet. Give them time. “Ain’t” made it in, and that verb didn’t have nearly the grassroots support of these three.
Indeed, this triad of “new verbs” are both the result and the harbinger of the most prominent types of social networks and Social Media Marketing in the world today: personal and professional blogs (with RSS feeds so you can stay “tuned in”), Twitter (the “mini-blog” suited to the info-bites attitude and fast-forward pace of our lives in the 21st century), and Facebook (the global water-cooler). As the Bible says of Faith, Hope, and Love, these three remain. Blogging, Twitter, and Facebook: which is “the greatest of these” remains to be seen.
In the realm of the online marketplace, however, it’s no contest. The winner is: all three of them. They are the leaders of the newest form of network marketing and one of the most effective: Social Media Marketing.
Why is it so effective? Three reasons that are particularly attractive to small business and other entrepreneurs: low impact/annoyance factor, cost effectiveness, and a viral spread of information.
1. Low Impact (and therefore low annoyance factor) :-
In the same way that email rapidly replaced telephone contact and so called “face time,” blogging, Twitter, and Facebook are replacing other more traditional forms of marketing, and for the same reasons.
Emailing became the norm for the “sender” of information because it was easier (both physically and emotionally) than making a phone call or meeting with someone in person. Email grants immediate completion and instant gratification: No getting a busy signal or, worse, an answering machine or voice mail inbox that required you to leave a message (wherein you might say the wrong thing and not be able to erase and re-record) and no having to carry on an unscripted conversation with someone in person (wherein the same dangers were ever present). The receiver was equally blessed by the ability to respond (or not) at his or her leisure and with the same assurance of faux pas-free “conversation.”
Social Media does the same for marketing by freeing the marketer to place his or her “ads” at any time, around the clock, 24/7, rather than to some PR office or publisher’s schedule, while simultaneously granting the target audience the ability read/view and/or delete at will instead of having to dispose of or recycle the publication, and all for the low, low price of . . . well, nothing.
Which naturally leads us to reason number 2.
2. Cost Effective (’cause it’s free!)
Well the section header pretty much says it all. You can’t get much more cost effective than “free,” and all of these Social Media Marketing venues are just that. Free as the air you breathe ~ which, by the way, is how many viruses spread.
3. Wherein a Virus can be Your Business’s Best Friend :-
Remember the “water-cooler” metaphor above? Years ago, in the traditional brick and mortar model of business, the water-cooler was the place where employees would gather to socialize during breaks, exchanging pleasantries and information, introducing the “new guy” to the old guard, telling jokes and showing off pictures of their pets or the new baby.
[Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - There is an Alternative!]
Long after the physical water-cooler had been replaced by bottled water, “hanging around the water-cooler” remained a metaphor for the casual meetings and conversations that took place among people in the physical spaces of a business environment. Whatever the place, the close physical proximity inherent to “hanging around the water-cooler,” made it equally easy to pass along a cold or flu bug with the jokes and those pictures of your little ones.
As it is in the physical world, so is it in the virtual, and it is in this way, especially, that Social Media Marketing is effective. Facebook is an especially good example of the virtual “water-cooler” inasmuch as people “meet” there and exchange information (including jokes and pictures of the fam) and provide the perfect growth environment for spreading a “virus” in the form of word-of-mouth marketing.
It’s little wonder, then, that adopting Social Media Marketing is a good idea for your small business. And it’s kind of comforting to some of us, after all, that even here, in the virtual business world, we can find in these new fangled technologies an echo of tradition and a sense of continuity that is familiar and reassuring.
About The Author
SKGTechnologies.com is a leading and quality service provider for all social media marketing services.
Building Brand Identity – Marketing With Twitter
May 18, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
Twitter, the net’s networking success story, is intriguing and intimidating because of its message limitations: they can be 140 characters, and no more.
This is to say; each message sent on Twitter can be no larger than the previous sentence. Not an additional letter, space, period or dash can be added. These limitations have proven to be the greatest asset and the greatest challenge for people trying to use Twitter for any number of purposes.
On the advantageous side, the short messages have created an entire culture of Twitter-fluent writers. The brevity of the message stretches creative muscles, making people use every trick to get the most information into the fewest characters. On the other hand it creates a severe headache for the marketing minded, as it doesn’t leave much room to present a case. Thus the vast majority of Tweets are short little social comments or updates, and most marketing revolves around calling attention to particular links.
Of course, there are always ways around limitations, and Twitter is something that every seriously market-minded organization needs to embrace in order to see continued success on the web. In the case of short message services like Twitter, the key lies as much in the peripheral data that builds up around the message as in the content itself.
Be SEO Minded
Twitter profiles are now ranked by search engines, Google in particular. Every SEO technique you’ve learned now has a new, exciting purpose. For example, consider the biography you’re able to construct using Twitter. This is a ripe opportuníty to develop some brand recognition right away. Put the title of the brand you’re marketing in the bio, and consider including the most relevant keywords in your profile. As ever, do so in a way that respects the user’s intelligence, and gives them something worth reading. Simply stringing together a chain of keywords is not the way to go.
Include keywords in your Tweets as well, taking care not to be terribly obvious about it. The first 20-30 characters are the best place, as later words are of decreased importance in a Google ranking search.
Identify Your Audience
Each brand rises and falls on the whim of the audience, known in this case as tweeple.
There are a number of applications available to help you with the process of identifying the tweeple that you want to cultivate into an audience. Twitterholic can help you identify the movers and shakers based on their Twitter traffic and their location. If you know your field or brand well, you can use this to locate groups with similar interests and woo them to your feed. Tweepz is a similar tool, focusing on location, and Twitter itself has a ‘near this location’ feature that can be used to identify tweeple nearby your center of business.
Let’s Give Them Something to Tweet About
Yes, Twitter is an effective way to quickly distribute information. But its real power is in its ability to create conversations about something interesting.
In theory you could simply gather up a large user list of tweeple and start spamming them with links promoting your latest gig. This is a surefire way to get flagged for abuse or ignored entirely, and thus is rather counterproductive to good marketing goals.
Instead, consider using alternative methods to drum up those conversations that travel like wildfire.
For example, there is the technique of Alternate Reality Gaming. This is a phenomenon based on the idea of taking ‘real’ events and building a game out of them. Last Call Poker was an ARG that intended to drum up sales for an upcoming video game, GUN.
LCP spread out information about gatherings, online incentives, and other attractions to get people excited about the western theme of the game. Tokens such as poker chips and other goodies were given out at these events, and GUN went on to have a very successful launch. People were invited into the world of the western, and the chatter eventually included 8 million participants.
This kind of rogue advertising is tailor-made to work with Twitter. Locations and dates can easily fall within the 140 character limitation, as can short explanations. Consider creating an ARG with a short story designed to work within 140 characters, locate an audience with the assorted Twitter tools at your disposal, and plan some exciting events to promote your brand. The chance to get involved always gets people talking, and the more esoteric games can span entire continents.
There are other methods, some more appropriate to each individual brand. Perhaps a modest bicycling business isn’t suited to promote a large ARG experience. They could, however, organize a bicycling flash mob by hopping onto the local bike hobbyist twitter feed and posting a date and time. The trick is less which technique you use, and more that you do your best to make it relevant. As always, strong content and clear presentation will win out over gimmicks and sales speak.
Also, consider one last thought. The introductory statements of each section in this article are Twitter compatible, and so is this one. Good luck and happy Tweeting.
About The Author
Enzo F. Cesario is an online branding specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to www.BrandSplat.com or visit our blog at www.iBrandCasting.com.
Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html
Sign Up For Blog Updates
Subscribe Below and Receive Our Free Report and 10 Day Email Series on "Local Business Domination: 10 Easy Ways to Attract Local Customers"
We respect your privacy. Your information is safe with us.Check Out This HOT Product! Highly Recommend.
-
Gallery
