TwitterToolsReviews |
- Nominate Your Favorite Social Media Blog: 5th Annual Top 10 Social Media Blog Contest
- 10 golden rules of twitter
- How to Create a Social Media Strategy By Spying Your Competitors
- Four Steps to Achieving Your Social Media Goals
| Nominate Your Favorite Social Media Blog: 5th Annual Top 10 Social Media Blog Contest Posted: 15 Jan 2014 09:10 PM PST By Cindy King
We are looking for your nomination for the Top 10 Social Media Blogs. The winners will be promoted in our 230,000-reader newsletter and announced on Social Media Examiner. How to NominatePlease make a single nomination of your favorite social media blog by commenting below and including why you like the blog (only your first nomination counts). Be sure to include a link to the blog. To be considered, a blog must be nominated by multiple people. Make your nomination by January 6th, 2014. The judges: Our judges include Lee Odden (author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing), Denise Wakeman (founder of The Blog Squad™) and Neal Schaffer (author of three books, including Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing). Judges' blogs are not eligible.
Winners will be selected based on the quality of their content, the frequency of their posts, reader involvement and their blog's ranking (in that order). Think part readers' choice and part Oscars.
Note that our judges will decide the final winners. Go ahead and enter your nomination right now in the box below and be sure to let your friends know about this contest.  Cindy King is the director of editorial for Social Media Examiner. She spent 25 years abroad in international business development and then built her own international business from scratch by using social business networking. Other posts by Cindy King » This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. The post Nominate Your Favorite Social Media Blog: 5th Annual Top 10 Social Media Blog Contest appeared first on TwitterToolsReviews. |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2014 02:47 PM PST
If you ever wanted to know what the traits of highly successful Twitter users you've come to the right place. The 10 Golden Rules of Twitter will help make you a Twitter success by modeling the masters. Brian Solis, Chris Brogan and myself engage with the following Twitter tactics on a daily basis, and you will find most if not all of them exhibited by any successful social media guru. Apply these strategies to your own Twitter presence and your following will start to really grow. You get out of Twitter what you put in to it so invest time into networking and engaging on a daily basis and the good karma that you build will compound and come back to you in time! 1. Reciprocity is KeyFollow and be followed, Retweet and be retweeted, follow and be followed. You have got to give in order to get, and the more time you are willing to invest in others the more likely they are to give you the time of day. Reciprocity is a powerful thing, and the main reason for the 255,000 followers I have currently, and the 400,000+ followers I have been able to build for the various accounts I have managed. Once your network grows to several thousand followers don't let it get to your head, I try to respond to everyone who is not an ass that sends me an @mention, and I even respond to some of the asses. Haha, but seriously this is key if you want to build a big brand and a strong network. Look at any Twitter giant and you will see that they have thousands and thousands of tweets and many are conversational. You've got to talk to people to really connect with them, it's just that simple. 2. Schedule Your Golden Tweets |
| How to Create a Social Media Strategy By Spying Your Competitors Posted: 15 Jan 2014 07:50 AM PST By Kristi Hines
Lacking insight into the social behaviors of your customers? No data, no problem! Chances are your competitors have done all the hard work and all you need to do is look for it. In this post, I'll show you how to research the competition's social game plan so you can build a solid social media strategy of your own. Finding the FundamentalsWhen it comes to social media marketing, you need to answer a few fundamental questions:
Everyone must answer these questions, including business owners who want to create a strategy for their own business, marketing managers who need to convince their CEO to invest in social media and consultants who create strategies for clients in a wide variety of industries. Fortunately, you can find answers through the process of competitor research. Keep reading to discover how to get insight on your competitors. #1: Comparing Audience SizeWhile you shouldn't obsess about how many fans or followers your competitors have, noting these numbers at the beginning of your campaign can help you answer the following important questions.  Noting the number of fans your competitors have can help you answer a few important questions relevant to your own business. Image source: iStockPhoto 1. Should your business be on social media? If your competitors have an audience on social media, whether it is 100 people or 100,000, the answer should be yes. Otherwise, your competitors are tapping into a customer base that your business could be completely missing out on. 2. Which networks should your business focus on? Do all of your competitors have strong presences on some networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but not others, such as Pinterest? If the answer is yes, then it means two things: 1) businesses in your industry do not do well on Pinterest or 2) with creativity, you have a chance to reach a group of customers with little competition. 3. Have you reached all of your target audience? Competitor research isn't just limited to businesses starting their social media strategy. If you have been using social media for a while, but not getting results, take a look at the size of your competitors' social media audiences to help you gauge whether you are reaching as many of your potential customers as possible, or whether you still have room to grow your network. How to Compare Your Competitors' Audience Size First, you'll want to figure out what social networks your competitors belong to. To do this, start by going to your competitors' website and/or blog to see what social icons they list in their header, sidebar or footer. Next, do a Google search for your competitors' business name. Typically, the social networks they are most active on will appear in the first three pages of search results. Once you've discovered the top networks your competitors use, you can collect their number of followers/fans simply by visiting their profiles and entering the numbers into a spreadsheet. Alternatively, you can use the tools mentioned below to find, analyze and monitor your competitors' audience size and growth. Facebook Pages to Watch If you already have a Facebook page, you can use the Pages to Watch section of your admin panel to add your competitors' Facebook pages to see how many likes they have and monitor their like growth on a weekly basis.  Monitor the growth of your competitor's Facebook audience with Facebook Pages to Watch. Simply use the Add Pages link to add new pages to your watch list. If you notice a particular competitor has a huge surge in growth, be sure to visit their page to see if they're doing something exciting with their audience. Twitter Counter Twitter Counter allows you to look at your competitors' follower growth for up to three months for free. You can look at one account at a time, or enter two accounts to compare Twitter followers and growth.  Monitor the growth of your competitor's Twitter followers with Twitter Counter. Wildfire To get a quick comparison of the number of Twitter followers, Facebook likes or Google+ circlers your competitors have, try Wildfire's free Who's Winning in Social tool. It gives you a current snapshot of audience sizes by entering the profile/page name or URL of your competitors' social presences.  Quickly compare your audience numbers for Twitter with a competitor's using Wildfire. After you get stats for the initial three competitors, you can add more competitors if desired. The nice part is you can see not only their current audience size, you can also see their growth over the last three years.  Compare your Facebook Page audience numbers with multiple competitors using Wildfire. Rival IQ Rival IQ is a competitor research and monitoring tool that allows you to enter an unlimited number of competitors and compare their social followings with yours.  Example of a Rival IQ Twitter Follower comparison. You can use Rival IQ to quickly glance at and regularly review Twitter followers, Facebook likes and Google+ circlers by counts for your accounts alongside your competitors'. #2: Measuring EngagementWhile audience size can tell you a lot, it can't tell you everything. You certainly don't want to emulate the style of a competitor that isn't engaging with their audience, or one that has simply bought their followers and fans to inflate their numbers, not their quality of relationships. This is why engagement must be an important part of your competitor research. So how do you measure your competitors' engagement? The free reports provided by Simply Measured are a great place to start. For Facebook, you can use the Facebook Competitive Analysis Report that will show you in-depth analysis of engagement for up to 10 Facebook pages with up to 250,000 likes. You will get graphs that show you the overall engagement by fans on posts by admins to each page, posts made by fans on each page, sharing engagement, people talking about the brand and an overview of which brands have the best engagement.  Example of a SimplyMeasured Facebook engagement report. After the chart, you'll get a table of the top posts from all of the pages with detailed breakdowns of the type of post (photo, video, text or link) and forms of engagement (likes, comments and shares).  Example of a SimplyMeasured Facebook engagement breakdown. For engagement analysis of competitors on Twitter, try the Twitter Customer Service Analysis Report. This shows you details of how your competitor handles customer service on Twitter, along with the number of tweets a competitor sends compared to the retweets and mentions they receive.  Example of a SimplyMeasured Twitter report. For engagement analysis of competitors on Google+, you can try their Google+ Page Report that will analyze any Google+ page with up to 100,000 circlers. For Instagram engagement analysis, you can use the Instagram User Report that will analyze any Instagram user with up to 25,000 followers. Both will show you how engaged the audiences of each account really are. #3: Looking at Profile SetupsOnce you've chosen a few networks to focus on based on your competitors' audience size and engagement, the next thing you'll want to consider is reviewing your top competitor's profile setup. This can give you inspiration for designing your own profiles. In particular, you'll want to note how each of your competitors uses the following profile/page elements. Cover Photos Facebook pages, Google+ pages, LinkedIn company pages and Twitter profiles all allow you to have custom cover/header photos. If you have no idea how to design yours, perusing your competitors' will definitely give you some ideas to work with. You might find that some of your competitors use the same image for consistent branding like HubSpot does on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  HubSpot's Facebook cover image.  HubSpot's Twitter cover image.  HubSpot's Google+ cover image.  HubSpot's LinkedIn cover image. Or you might find your competitors do something a little different for each social network like Ford does on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  Ford's Facebook cover image.  Ford's Twitter cover image.  Ford's Google+ cover image.  Ford's LinkedIn cover image. While you're looking at cover/header photos, also note the use of profile photos/icons. Are your competitors using a photo of a person or logo? Depending on your industry and business type, this could make a big difference in connecting with your audience. Descriptions Next on the list of things to note is the descriptions your competitors use for their business. Why are bios, short descriptions and About information so important? It's simple; your 160-character Twitter bio could be the first impression a potential customer gets of your business. You'll want to make that count. When you're browsing through your competitors' design, you can also copy and paste their descriptions into a Word document for reference. Or, if you used the Rival IQ tool mentioned earlier, you can see your competitors' Twitter bios, Facebook descriptions, Google+ taglines and Google+ introductions all together.  Rival IQ makes it easy to compare the different ways your competitors are using their social media descriptions. Links If you want to get traffic back to your website from social media, strategic placement of your website links is key. While analyzing your competitors' profiles, look at where they place links to their websites, what links they use (homepage, sales page, landing page, etc.) and what calls to action precede the link. If you look back at the previous image showing the Facebook page descriptions of top social media management tools, you can see that most have a link in their description, and three out of five of those that included a link specifically ask their fans to try their software. Analyze Content Posting Last but not least is the content. After your profiles and pages are set up and you are working toward building your audience, your ongoing goal will be to post great content that keeps your followers and fans engaged with your business. Coming up with a content calendar for social media always leads to a lot of questions, including:
Ok, so the last question should be determined by your business, but the answers to the first two questions can be learned from your competitors. Outside of scanning through each of your competitors' posts and noting any posts that seem particularly successful in terms of engagement, you can use the following tools. Simply Measured Simply Measured has a few useful free tools. If you really want to dig deep into analysis of a competitor's posts, start with the free Facebook Content Analysis. This tool analyzes the last two weeks worth of posts and breaks down engagement by post type and per post.  Analyze competitor Facebook content engagement with SimplyMeasured. The Google+ Page Report and Instagram User Report also detail the top posts from your competitors based on engagement and type. Rival IQ Rival IQ allows you to see the top content from all of your competitors within the last 7–90 days, sorting content by the most overall engagement, likes, shares, comments, retweets, favorites and so on.  View all your competitors' top content with Rival IQ. Between Simply Measured and Rival IQ, you should never run short of social posting inspiration! In Conclusion As you can see, competitor research can help you determine where you should focus your social media marketing campaign, how to get it started and ways to get engaged with your audience. This is the information you need to create a strong social media strategy for your business. What do you think? Have you performed social media competitor research? If so, what did you learn? What tools would you recommend? Please share in the comments! Photos from Shutterstock.This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. The post How to Create a Social Media Strategy By Spying Your Competitors appeared first on TwitterToolsReviews. |
| Four Steps to Achieving Your Social Media Goals Posted: 15 Jan 2014 03:00 AM PST By Melissa Burkheimer
Do you feel as if you're spending lots of time on social media with little direction and few results? In this article, I'll show you how to streamline your social media marketing to achieve your goals. #1: Set Realistic Goals for Your BusinessWhen you set goals for your business, set one realistic goal that's measurable. For example, if you own a local flower shop and you sell 20-25 flower arrangements per day, try starting off with a goal of selling 30 per day. Adding an extra 5-10 sales a day is certainly more realistic than adding 30.  Your strategy starts with goals. Image source: iStockPhoto. When you use a realistic number as your goal, you can track the increase or decrease in sales at the end of the month. This makes the goal measurable. #2: Learn How You Can Help Your CustomerOnce you set your goal, determine how you're going to use social media to help you achieve it. In his book, Launch, author Michael Stelzner talks about the Elevation Principle. Put simply, the Elevation Principle is: "great content" plus "other people" minus "marketing messages" equals "growth."  How can you help your customers with the content you produce? Stelzner goes on to talk about how using this principle will help change your mindset from "What can we sell you?" to "How can we help you?" To help your customer, do the following things: Amy Porterfield uses her signup form to let visitors tell her about their biggest business frustration when they join her list. This helps her tailor content that solves her target audience's challenges.  Amy Porterfield helps her clients choose to receive her best content when they subscribe to her list. The more you learn about the challenges your customers face, the easier it is to create content that solves their problems. #3: Determine Your Traffic SourcesAs you work toward your social media goals, it's important to know where your traffic comes from so you can maximize the time you spend using social media. If you aren't sure which social media networks drive the most traffic to your site, use this opportunity to analyze your web traffic using Google Analytics. If you want to put your analytic process on autopilot, you can even set up multiple advanced segments. After you execute your social media strategy for 30 days or so, compare the results and you'll know which social networks drive your website traffic and where you should focus your efforts. Because James Wedmore is a video marketing expert, he uses YouTube as his main traffic source to build his businesses online.  James Wedmore generates a majority of his web traffic from YouTube videos. When food blogger and TV personality Kristin Porter from Iowa Girl Eats started using Pinterest for her food blog in July 2011, she got 200-500 page views per day from Pinterest. Fast-forward to October 2012, and Pinterest generated 20,000+ page views per day. As Rick Mulready said, "If social media makes sense for your business, be where your customers are." Find out where your traffic comes from so you can spend more time where your target audience spends theirs. #4: Build Your Content StrategySo far, you have taken steps to:
Now, it's time to pull it all together. First you'll need to generate helpful content that's useful to your audience. Use what you learned in previous steps to align your content development with your social media follower demographics and your business objectives. The ladies who work at the upscale boutique Aimee often post photos on their Facebook page of themselves wearing the clothes they sell. This helps their ideal target keep up with new and different trends coming in style.  "Meagan and Amy from Aimee show off some of their new fall clothes on a Friday afternoon." Make a list of helpful posts you will create, and then share the posts with your community manager. Use a content calendar to let everyone see what's publishing on which social media networks and when. If you have a larger brand and/or social media team managing your presence on multiple platforms, take some notes from Jimmy Fallon.  Jimmy Fallon creates a buzz on social media. He posts show previews from YouTube on Twitter and tweets during live events. As you develop content, remember to include the call to action. Give your online followers a place to go. Whatever your ideal end result is, use calls to action that will help your audience get there. On my Facebook page, I use a call to action in the About section to direct my fans to a free guide that gets them started with a marketing plan.  You can link to a specific program or page on your website in the About section of your Facebook fan page. I solve their problem with content as a free gift, and I achieve my goal of collecting their email address. As you execute your strategy, the content you publish should help your customers and help you reach your goals. Now, It's Your Turn If you feel you are doing too much on social media with few results, try streamlining your marketing by following these four steps. When you go where your customers are and determine your business goals, it's surprisingly easy to find the right social media marketing tactics you need for your business. Give yourself a goal to achieve and a plan to pursue it, but don't let the execution take up your entire day. Monitor the amount of time it takes you and pay attention to where you can further streamline the process. What do you think? What tips do you have for streamlining your social media activities? Have you set and met goals by using social media? I'd love to hear your questions and comments below. Images from iStockPhoto.This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. The post Four Steps to Achieving Your Social Media Goals appeared first on TwitterToolsReviews. |
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