TwitterToolsReviews |
- Four Steps to Achieving Your Social Media Goals
- 6 Ways to Promote Your Business With Pinterest Places
- 14 Social Media Tools Used by Marketing Pros
- 9 Ways to Get #More From #Twitter
- Blog Growth: How to Build a Mega-Following
- 4 Social Media Tools to Improve Your Social Media Marketing
| Four Steps to Achieving Your Social Media Goals Posted: 11 Mar 2014 02:37 AM PDT 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 Make Money Online With Twitter Marketing. |
| 6 Ways to Promote Your Business With Pinterest Places Posted: 11 Mar 2014 02:00 AM PDT By Anna Francis
Have you heard of Pinterest place pins? Whether you have a storefront, products or a travel aspect to your business, consider exploring the geographic elements of Pinterest In this article, you'll learn six ways you can use Pinterest place pins boards to promote your business or products.  Pinterest's new Places boards have really taken off. How Place Pins WorkBusinesses now have two ways to associate their pins with a geographic location. In addition to rich pins, Pinterest introduced Pinterest place pins in November 2013. Place pins use Foursquare's location API combined with Mapbox's map technology. Plus, if a location you want to pin doesn't show up, you can simply add it. Brands can create a board to focus on places in a single city or country, or a board that focuses on similar places across the globe.  This board from Outside Magazine shares places across the United States. This tool is a dream come true for companies in the travel industry. Just check out Hotels.com's Hit the Slopes board of best places to ski, New York City: The Official Guide's Free (and Almost Free) in NYC board and all of the #VXTraveler City Guides on Virgin America's Pinterest page. Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts has a variety of place boards, showcasing everything from concierge suggestions to honeymoon destinations. However, just about any company can think outside the box and come up with a creative way to use Pinterest place pins. Outside Magazine created a board to share places across the United States that offer lots of outside recreation opportunities to their residents. Use place pins not only for your locations, but to share other places that would be of interest to your followers. How to Create a Pinterest Places BoardTo get started, select Place Boards in the menu from the upper left-hand corner of your Pinterest profile.  The Place Boards option has been added to the main Pinterest menu. From there, click on Create Board. As you fill in the fields, make sure you select the Add a Map option.  Be sure the Add a Map option has Yes next to it. On the next page, start adding pins by clicking on Add a Place.  Place pin boards display with a map behind them. This is where you assign a city location to your pin. Once you choose a city, your searches will return results for venues in that location. For example, Bonefish Grill has several locations across the nation, but only the Boise location showed up in my search.  Manage the location of your place pin by changing the city. As you add place pins, you can change the city location at any time, which makes it easy to share multiple locations for the same vendor on one map. Now that you know how to create a board for your place pins, let's see how you can use them in everyday promotion efforts. #1: Map Your Brick-and-Mortar LocationsHow great would it be if people who found you on Pinterest knew exactly where your nearest location is? Whether you have one location or a dozen, Pinterest place pins let you provide your customers with a visual guide to where they can find you. Starbucks Coffee did a nice twist on this concept. They created a Store Design board and pinned the locations of their uniquely designed stores.  Starbucks' Store Design board has pins for uniquely designed stores throughout the world. Create a Locations board to highlight your locations in one country or around the world. Whether you want to add a unique slant, as Starbucks did, is up to you. #2: Pin Your ClientsPart of positioning your brand or business is pointing toward the clients you choose to work with. When you display your current clients on a map with Pinterest place pins, it's easy to see how far your geographic influence reaches. You can also provide a link back to their sites so potential clients can see the companies you work with and what they do. Create a Client board to showcase both the quantity and quality of your current clients to anyone who's thinking of working with you in the future. #3: Pin Ideas for Your Clients/CustomersAnother option is to create a board with tips for your clients based on where they're located. Simple Skincare created a places board called Winter Skincare Around the U.S. The board has skincare tips for different climates, and illustrates the best ways for the people in those regions to use their products.  Simple Skincare has a places board with skincare tips for customers who live in different parts of the United States. If you can add tips for customers based on the place they live, that can raise your expertise level and the value of your brand. #4: Introduce the TeamEvery business is made up of employees who come together and work as a team. They provide the product or service that makes your business successful. Pinterest place pins can help your customers to get to know your team as people. Using place pins, map the hometowns of all of your employees, alongside their favorite restaurants or shops. Better yet, create a group board with all employees and let them pin their favorite places and spaces on their own. These insights give customers a glimpse of your team members' personalities. People like buying from people they trust. A board featuring employees helps customers get to know your team and build that relationship. #5: Share Your Inspiration and ProcessEvery brand or business is inspired by something. Learning about that inspiration helps people identify with you. Tundra Restaurant Supply in Boulder, Colorado created a places board to showcase their favorite places in their state, so the restaurants they work with could get to know them better.  Tundra Restaurant Supply created a places board so they could share how much they love their state with their customers. Customers love transparency, and using Pinterest place pins to show them all of the ins and outs of your business makes them more likely to trust you. Use Pinterest place pins to share the locations around the world that inspire your products or services. If you own a cafe, show customers where you get your coffee beans. If you run a Chinese restaurant, tell them where your dishes originate. If other businesses work with you to create your final product, pin them too. You can also share your whole process from start to finish. This will encourage loyalty from current customers and attract new customers. #6: Demonstrate Your Customer Reach With a CompetitionNo matter where you're based, chances are that your products and services are used across the country or even around the world. Let your customers tell that story! Encourage your customers to pin pictures of your products or services from wherever they are and offer a prize to the pinner who lives farthest from your location. A competition gives your customers a reason to share the product they bought from you. Not only will people see how popular your products are, each new pin increases your visibility. Over to You Pinterest is one of the top social media platforms currently out there, and it's continually growing. There are a ton of creative ideas popping up on how to embrace new features like Pinterest place pins. Whether it's to showcase yourself, your employees, your clients or your partners, use these tips for inspiration on how you can use boards with Pinterest's place pins to connect your brand to customers around the world. What do you think? Are you using Pinterest place pins? What ideas can you share for this newest Pinterest feature? Please leave your thoughts and comments below. 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 6 Ways to Promote Your Business With Pinterest Places appeared first on Make Money Online With Twitter Marketing. |
| 14 Social Media Tools Used by Marketing Pros Posted: 10 Mar 2014 07:51 PM PDT By Cindy King
Are you wondering what tools marketing pros are using successfully? We asked fourteen well-known marketers to share the latest social media tools they've been using. Discover how you can use these tools to help you to get more out of your social media marketing. #1: Mention Todd Wheatland Mention was developed as a user-friendly replacement for Google Alerts. They're a textbook example of how to build a platform by doing one thing better than anyone else. As well as being an absolute joy to use, it captures so many more, ahem, 'mentions' online than any other platform I've used that it's become my #1 go-to social mention reference tool. There are many clever things behind the way Mention is set up. They've taken the Apple approach to clean and simple UI to give you great functionality as a default and the power to modify settings to really hone in on what's important to your circumstances.  Mention provides clean and simple functionality. Apart from doing a fantastic job of identifying online mentions, some of my favorite features are:
Of course, with success, they're quickly adding features—including an enterprise-level offering—that will make them seem increasingly like a lot of the more established players in the social tools space. So far though, they've done a great job of maintaining simplicity and delivering on their core offering. Todd Wheatland, head of thought leadership at Kelly Services. #2: Addvocate Jay Baer My favorite new social media tool is Addvocate. I like it so much, I invested in the company and joined their board. Addvocate solves a very common problem in social media, which is the need to decentralize your messengers. Almost always, the employees in your company have more social connections (combined) than the company does for its official social media outposts. Thus, smart companies need to find ways to ask employees to occasionally share relevant information on their personal accounts. Amber Naslund and I wrote about this in The NOW Revolution, and recommended a "message of the day" email that is sent to all social media–active employees. Addvocate takes that concept and makes it much, much better. Employees install a simple browser plugin that enables them to receive content recommendations from a centralized marketing team, while also enabling them to recommend content to the marketing team and to one another. The marketing team then gets detailed statistics showing which employees are sharing content on social, how many clicks and engagement actions each employee is generating, etc.  Addvocate enables you to share content with colleagues. It's an incredibly easy-to-use, remarkably inexpensive (just a few dollars per month) social media tool that removes the pain of teamwork and content sharing/distribution. I use it constantly to share potential topics for inclusion in our daily email newsletter. Jay Baer, founder of Convince & Convert. #3: Swayy Jamie Turner The best new tool I've seen in many months is called Swayy. It's a platform that drops interesting content into a dashboard where you can scan or read the most interesting articles. The best feature isn't the fact that the articles are dropped right in front of your nose. The best feature is the sharing.  Swayy finds you the best content to share with your target audience. At the bottom of each article, you can click the "share" button and it automatically opens up your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. With the click of a button, you're able to share articles across multiple platforms. Plus, you can schedule your sharing times well in advance. That way, you're able to share multiple articles across multiple platforms multiple times a day. Brilliant! Jamie Turner, founder of the 60 Second Marketer. #4: eGrabber's Account-Researcher Viveka Von Rosen One of the reasons LinkedIn works so well is that it tells us exactly how we're related to the people in our network and the best ways of communicating with them (messages, invitations, introductions and InMails, in that order). LinkedIn's limitation is with the folks who fall outside of our network; especially if we don't have $10 for each InMail we want to send. Another limitation is that LinkedIn is increasingly hiding our connections from us. First taking away last name, then whole name and picture altogether! Let me start by saying eGrabber Account-Researcher is NOT a free tool. You can get a free trial, but it's so incredibly powerful for researching prospects that it's absolutely worth the $80 a month fee. Can you eventually find the same info on Google with the right algorithms? Yes. Will it take you hours and hours to yield results that aren't as comprehensive? Yes. Is your time worth more than that? YES! Essentially, Account-Researcher gets through LinkedIn's restrictions to better research and find a prospect's contact and company information.  Account-Researcher helps you research a prospect. It cuts prospect research time down to a few minutes and will help you:
LinkedIn isn't about selling your stuff. It's about finding and engaging with people, developing that feeling of "knowing, liking and trusting." And once you've established a relationship with the person, you can move to the next stage in the game. The more you know about prospects, the better your chance of getting to that next stage. The power of LinkedIn is that it helps us connect with real people in real life. We need to go old school. Do searches, do research and then pick up the phone! Account-Researcher makes that MUCH easier. Viveka von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day, host of #LinkedInChat and co-moderator of LinkedStrategies. #5: Compfight Rich Brooks Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog and draw them into your post. They also grab attention when someone shares your blog post on Facebook or another social media channel. Unfortunately, good photography can cost a lot of money, and with regular blogging, the investment can add up fast. Enter Compfight. Compfight searches Flickr's photos that have the appropriate Creative Commons license for Commercial Use.  Compfight is a great tool when searching for an image for a blog post. Do a quick search for ideas, objects, emotions—whatever will best represent the idea in your blog post. Compfight will even provide you with the HTML code for proper attribution. (Yes, you need to give attribution to the photographer, but that's a small price to pay!) If you're blogging regularly but working on a shoestring budget, be sure to give Compfight a try! Rich Brooks, president of flyte new media, a web design and Internet marketing company that helps small businesses succeed online. #6: Tagboard Kim Garst Tagboard is my new cool social media tool. To describe it simply, Tagboard is a way to monitor keywords (a.k.a. hashtags) across multiple social media channels. To monitor conversations that revolve around specific hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and Vine, Tagboard pulls in content from all of these sites based on a specified hashtag and creates a custom board filled with content from all platforms. Why Is it Useful? 1. Brand monitoring. It's useful to anyone who monitors their own brand or other people's brands as a part of their business. It is especially useful for small business owners who do not want to invest in social media monitoring. 2. Content Curation. It's a great way to find content around a specific topic. For example, if you want to find out what others are saying about breaking industry news, search by keyword(s) and find articles, conversations, etc. Once you conduct the search, narrow the focus to a single social media platform. In other words, view just tweets with that specific hashtag. You can even reply to the conversations right from within Tagboard!  You can reply to the conversation. 3. Real-time Leads at Your Fingertips! Suppose you're a realtor in Miami and you're looking to connect with people who are moving to Miami. Search for real-time conversations that are taking place on multiple social media platforms using targeted keywords such as #MovingToMiami. Connect, share some valuable info and start working on building a relationship that will lead to a potential sale.  Search for real-time conversation around targeted keywords. Best of all, it's a free tool! Check it out! Kim Garst, CEO of Boom Social. #7: ManageFlitter Stephanie Sammons A cool social media tool that has helped me get a better handle on effectively managing my Twitter account is ManageFlitter. As you're probably aware, Twitter can be very noisy! A tool that can help you manage your account while growing your following with the right people is very valuable. The ManageFlitter motto is "Work Faster and Smarter with Twitter." ManageFlitter integrates with your Twitter account to help you effectively:
Although some of the above features are paid, you can sign up for a free account and get access to basic features for testing the service. The Pro Plan for more robust individual users is $12/month.  ManageFlitter has several price plans to choose from. One caveat with ManageFlitter or any Twitter-based tool that can help you manage your account is to understand Twitter's following rules and best practices. Ultimately you're responsible for adhering to these rules. ManageFlitter has been working with Twitter for over 3 years and they've helped almost 2 million users. I would recommend using ManageFlitter to build a more relevant following, keep your account cleaned up and prioritize quality over quantity! Stephanie Sammons, founder and CEO of Wired Advisor. #8: Socialbakers Stephanie Shkolnik Socialbakers has an effective tool called Analytics Pro, which provides an understanding of how your brand stacks up against your competitors, specifically across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—for now. The simple interface allows you to input a social media channel and gain insights into engagement rates and channel growth, and understand which contributors from your social communities are most active, providing an opportunity to build relationships and enable continued advocacy.  Check out how your brand compares to others in your niche. An otherwise painfully manual process, this tool also allows you to see how you're performing against your competitors to learn which campaigns, content and influencers are driving the most effective conversations. While Socialbakers is a paid tool, a trial period will impress you and show decision-makers how much more effectively your time will be spent on reporting, gaining insights and informing social strategy. Stephanie Shkolnik, social media director at Digitaria. #9: Post Planner Ian Cleary Post Planner is a content management tool that runs as an application within Facebook. What's great about Post Planner is that in addition to providing the ability to schedule content, it also provides fantastic facilities for sourcing and adding content to your queue for later posting. You can search a database of thousands of status updates on a range of general topics, find content that's trending in your niche or add Facebook pages, Twitter accounts or blogs and easily add content to your queue from these sources.  You can easily add content to your queue. It also provides real-time analytics on posts, so you immediately see what's working and not working. Post Planner is a time saver, enabling you to plan and manage your Facebook content in advance, rather than doing it off the cuff. Ian Cleary, founder of RazorSocial. #10: Komfo Neal Schaffer There are a lot of Facebook page analytic tools and social media dashboards that include Facebook analysis. A problem with some of these tools is that they try to do so much that it's hard to gain simple-to-understand, meaningful insight about your Facebook content strategy from them. Others just provide a lot of data, some in better-looking forms than others, without offering any other handholding as to how that data can be utilized to improve your Facebook engagement. That's why it was refreshing to discover a new free Facebook page analytics tool from Komfo—a company claiming to be "the leading tool provider in the Nordics within the Social Media Marketing space." Komfo provides analysis with additional handholding to help you analyze your Facebook content based on the following types of analytics:
The tool also includes the "People Talking About This" number, which they call "Stories," as well as overall Reach. Another welcome feature is the ability to send an email and give others access to your report online without Facebook authorization. This is a nice touch that makes the tool even more useful for large and distributed teams. Neal Schaffer, founder of Maximize Social Business. #11: Rignite Andrea Vahl An interesting tool I recently discovered is Rignite, which helps monitor several social media platforms—including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—from one place. It was just launched in April and they will be adding features and other social networks. The best thing about the tool is the team aspect of this product. You can have forums and chats within the tool, and assign tasks to people on the team. So this works well for teams of 3-6 people who are managing the same accounts. They have tracking and insights incorporated into the dashboard.  You can monitor your fan base within the dashboard. This tool will become even more valuable as they add some of the features they have planned to help monitor your social media contacts more closely. While the tool works well right now for monitoring and posting to your accounts for a team of people, I think this will be one to watch as it evolves! Andrea Vahl, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, uses her improv comedy skills to blog as Grandma Mary, Social Media Edutainer. #12: SocialOomph Jeff Bullas One of the coolest social media marketing tools that I've discovered and used is SocialOomph. The challenge for most bloggers and social media marketers is not just creating the content, but also distributing it. Twitter is a great social media network to assist you with sharing your content to your followers, but having to tweet constantly is time-consuming. SocialOomph (professional edition, which costs about $25 a month) allows you to not only load and schedule tweets, you can also make them recurring, saving you the onerous and time-consuming task of ongoing scheduling. Load your tweets once, then set and forget.  SocialOomph is useful for scheduling evergreen content. SocialOomph lets you load up to 500 unique tweets and the major benefit is that it saves me about 25-30 hours a week, or 100-120 hours per month, of ongoing tweet scheduling! Jeff Bullas, blogger, author, strategist and speaker. #13: Zapier Paul Colligan Zapier has changed the social media marketing game for me in the most dramatic of ways. This service connects systems in ways once only possible with a massive programming budget. You can say things across the social networks like "text your email to (503) 405-4415 to get the free video (or just leave a message if you don't have texting)" and have that sync automatically with whatever email system you're using (from MailChimp to AWeber) and/or with any CRM you run (from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Salesforce).  You can automate tasks among online services. Zapier also automatically generates a Google spreadsheet for you that tracks every time a certain keyword is mentioned in Twitter and makes it possible for you to automatically send selected Facebook Posts to your blog. In addition, when you do a webcast (paid or otherwise) through Eventbrite, all of the information collected is integrated into everything else you're doing (I leverage everything they offer to make my event as social as possible). The possibilities are endless, and you should see the running list of integration ideas I have. At the time I write this, Zapier brags of 233 web services integrated. I'm sure they'll add more before this piece is published. With Zapier, social is now one big ecosystem, and I'm thrilled to play in it. Paul Colligan, director of content marketing at Instant Customer. #14: FixYourFunnel and Mobivity Beth Hayden Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to attend a live workshop given by the fabulous Pam Slim (author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, and a world-renowned business coach). At the end of Pam's talk, she told the audience that she had a handout for us. Pam surprised me by announcing a phone number and saying "Text your name and email address to that number, and I'll send you the handout." I could see people whipping out their phones so they could text her. There were no messy sign-up sheets and people could follow her instructions on the spot—and she got their email addresses right away, so she could follow up with possible leads. I had never seen anyone utilize text messages for that purpose, and thought it was a great idea, so I followed up with Pam later and asked her how she pulled off this cool process. She recommended two tools: FixYourFunnel (an Infusionsoft-specific tool) and Mobivity.  Utilize text messages for your business.  Avoid messy sign-up sheets and use a text messaging service instead. As a consultant and author who does regular public speaking and training, I can't wait to integrate these smart mobile marketing tools into my sales process and see the results I get! Beth Hayden, author of Pinfluence, a speaker and social media expert. Who are these social media pros?
Social Media Success Summit 2013 is a live online conference that will empower you to use social media to gain more exposure, increase traffic, cultivate loyal fans and grow your business. More than 45 of the world's leading social media pros will show you how. The event is spread over four weeks in October. Join nearly 3,000 fellow marketers at the online mega-conference designed to empower and inspire you with social media marketing tactics—brought to you by Social Media Examiner. Why should you attend Social Media Success Summit?You'll hear from 45+ of the world's top social media marketing pros as they reveal their newest social media marketing tips and practical, real-world, proven examples. You'll be able to take your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, blogging, podcasting and video marketing to an entirely new level. What do you think? Do you use any of these social media tactics? What's working well for you today? Please share your thoughts in the box below. 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. Five Filters recommends:
The post 14 Social Media Tools Used by Marketing Pros appeared first on Make Money Online With Twitter Marketing. |
| 9 Ways to Get #More From #Twitter Posted: 10 Mar 2014 01:36 PM PDT If you talk about social media, invariably someone is going to say something I'm sure you've heard a lot: "I don't have time to chit-chat. Time is money, and I don't care about a bunch of nerds' opinions anyway." …or something along those lines! Twitter is often the target of such criticism. Now, reading Social Media Examiner, you might be surprised to hear that sometimes I think people who say this have a point. Sometimes. Fact is, if you see Twitter or any other social media service as a venue for chit-chat, and that's how you use it for hours a day, then you're likely better off doing something more productive with your time. On the other hand, there are ways to get a lot of value out of Twitter. As with most things, it all depends on how you use it. We programmers have a saying: "Garbage In – Garbage Out." This essentially means you get out what you put in. If you put in chit-chat, don't be surprised if that's all you see in return! Here are nine benefits I've personally seen through my couple of years of Twitter usage.
1. Networking connectionsBecause of my Twitter network, I've had real conversations with people I never would have been able to reach otherwise. Also I've been able to form deeper connections with people in real life because of our first meeting on Twitter. It might not last, but right now Twitter is allowing people to slip past the traditional gatekeepers that might have prevented them from talking to people they want to reach. If you think of how some executives, celebrities or just very busy people have their email inbox and telephone locked down tight, being able to slip 140 characters past all that and get right in front of them, well… it's like the magic wand of networking. 2. TrafficHow much traffic you can generate with Twitter depends on a number of factors, not least how many engaged followers you have. "Engaged" being a key point; they have to want to hear from you, otherwise they might as well not be following. But get the right combination of audience targeting and presentation and you can drive a great deal of traffic with Twitter, and that traffic can turn into a flood once you take into account the viral nature of the retweet. Even with humble, standard links you can easily get dozens of clicks that you might not see otherwise.  Twitter drives traffic. 3. LeadsTwitter is fast becoming an instant referral system for business leads. Someone will ask if anyone knows a consultant/freelancer/vendor/etc. with a certain skill set or experience, and others will reply with suggestions. If you build a strong network, you will get a good share of those referrals. I have seen it happen repeatedly, from design and programming through where to stay on vacation! 4. Direct salesObviously the end result of all those referrals is you get sales, but also sales of products and other services too. Dell is making millions of additional dollars this way. Keep in mind that if all you do is promote your products, people will stop listening, so keep up the good content too. Make an offer and see what happens. 5. InsightsThere are some very clever people on Twitter sharing their wisdom and expertise. Through Twitter conversations my opinions about a lot of topics have changed. Keep an open mind and you can tap into the collected wisdom of smart people all over the globe and from many different industries and backgrounds. You can also learn a lot about what people think about the content that you put out and the service you offer.  Ask questions for content. 6. ContentYour Twitter followers can be a terrific source of additional valuable content. If you poll your followers about a subject, you can get ideas that you would never be able to generate yourself. This is Twitter ascrowdsourcing model! All you have to do is ask the question and collate the answers. Obviously you need to ask the question in a certain way and you need to get followers' permission. The best method for me is to say up front that I'm writing an article and would like my followers' input. Ask an open-ended question that people on Twitter would enjoy discussing outside of the article. Avoid yes/no questions, or anything that would potentially embarrass or annoy your followers to answer. If there is a chance that followers could feel they might get the answer "wrong," they will simply not reply. 7. AnswersI can't count the times that Twitter has saved me… From computer problems to which car to buy, Twitter folks have the answers you are looking for. Google search is great but it can't answer questions like the Twitter hive mind can. Twitter understands that humans can't put all their needs into tidy little keywords, especially when we are not good at expressing the problem! Need a certain type of software? Ask Twitter! Want to know the name of that singer who wrote the song from that movie? Ask Twitter! 8. NewsI don't need to list all the stories that have broken on Twitter by now; they are already well-established. Yes, there is some misinformation, but Twitter is great at clearing that up too. Twitter is now my default news feed, with the advantage that you can ask questions and get understanding. 9. InspirationTwitter messages and discussions are a constant source of inspiration andmotivating ideas. Not just for content but for all kinds of things. For example, through Twitter I was inspired by people doing 5k and 10k charity runs, so I decided I wanted to start running. Bonus: And yes, chit-chat!There is nothing wrong with a bit of a chat, as long it's not excessive or done at the expense of work. My social media activities are often a break from work; coffee and a chat can be a great way to recharge your batteries. We all need a break once in a while. Of course, I asked my Twitter followers what they get out of their time investment. Here is what they told me:
   
How are you using Twitter? Have you tried any of these ideas? Please share your thoughts in the comments… The post 9 Ways to Get #More From #Twitter appeared first on Make Money Online With Twitter Marketing. |
| Blog Growth: How to Build a Mega-Following Posted: 10 Mar 2014 07:08 AM PDT By Michael Stelzner
Are you wondering how you can write content that will generate more comments, shares and subscribers? To learn how to grow a successful blog, I interview Syed Balkhi for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast. More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing. The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting). In this episode, I interview Syed Balkhi, founder of multiple popular websites, including WPBeginner and List25. He's also the founder of OptinMonster. Syed shares how he grew his very popular sites and provides actionable tips that you can employ to grow your own blog traffic. You'll learn about the different types of content that work best and some profitable choices for monetization. Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below! Listen NowPodcast: Play in new window | Download You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or Blackberry. Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show: Blog GrowthThe idea for WPBeginner Back in 2009, Syed did consulting work for small businesses, with a lot of the work retainer-based. To free up some time, he decided to switch his clients to WordPress, which would give them the ability to change their own text and not have to contact him directly. Once this change happened, Syed was still approached with the same questions about WordPress. At the time there was no other WordPress resource site out there for beginners. So WPBeginner was formed on July 4, 2009.  WPBeginner was started because so many people were asking the same questions about WordPress. Syed explains how his goal in the beginning was to produce multiple posts a day and answer all of the questions that he was asked. The idea was to put the answers on the website so he could link back to them, rather than send an email. When he noticed that other people were using the site, he knew there was definitely a market for it. You'll hear how Syed used Twitter to help with content creation and why he used Digg and StumbleUpon to push articles. Listen to the show to find out why it was Syed's goal to help individuals, rather than have hugely popular articles. WPBeginner's site metrics Syed states that WPBeginner gets an average of 1.5 million page views a month and they have just over 70,000 followers on Twitter. Listen to the show to find out how these figures are similar to Social Media Examiner's. The lessons learned about content creation From the very beginning, Syed built an email list, but he didn't engage with it. At first, he didn't realize the value of asking people to ask you questions. Now when you subscribe to WPBeginner, it asks you one question: "What is the one thing we can help you with right now?"  Once you have subscribed to WPBeginner, you are given the opportunity to ask one question. You'll discover why there is huge value in this one question and how this has changed the way WPBeginner creates content. Syed used to be the only person who wrote articles, but the site now has multiple writers with a very good editorial workflow. Listen to the show to hear how the interaction and response to email has developed the WPBeginner community. WPBeginner's business model Syed explains that his business is monetized through building WordPress applications and plugins. A lot of the time, it's conversion marketing for clients. The WPBeginner brand allows them to position themselves as experts. Whenever somebody wants a WordPress company to work with, they automatically think of WPBeginner. You'll hear how they use affiliate links for paid plugins. In the beginning, Syed tried display advertising. He had ads through AdSense, BuySellAds and private ad sales. You'll find out why these ads didn't work for the WPBeginner audience and how affiliate deals make more sense.  Affiliate deals make more sense for the WPBeginner audience. Listen to the show to find out why we use DoubleClick for Publishers at Social Media Examiner. The challenges Syed explains that one of the biggest challenges they face is being able to stay up to date. Blog articles can become outdated, and because of WPBeginner's reputation, people in the WordPress community hold them to a very high standard. So they have to make sure articles are updated to the best of their ability. The editorial team spends time making sure all articles are relevant and concurrently strives to produce new content. Listen to the show to find out why all of WPBeginner's articles are how-to information. How List25 started Syed explains that List25 is an entertainment site. Each article relates to 25 things on a particular topic. The slogan is "Consistently Conciliating Curiosity." You'll hear the original idea that Syed had for a new site and how it turned into List25.  List25 was launched at BlogWorld LA in November 2011. At present, List25 has over 250,000 Facebook likes, over 530,000 YouTube subscribers and 62 million YouTube views. The site gets tons of visitors every month. It's growing at 52,000 YouTube subscribers a month. Syed believes the reason why it's grown so quickly is because of the type of content. It appeals to the masses and is much more shareable. It raises curiosity in people's minds. You'll discover why list-based posts are very popular and shareable. One of the things that Syed did differently with List25 was to grow on all different outlets. You'll find out why they have a lot of success on Tumblr and StumbleUpon, and how Syed uses Twitter search to ride the hashtag during holidays. Listen to the show to find out how content is created for List25. The strategy for List25′s YouTube channel The videos on YouTube are created with the images from each article and made into a slideshow. Syed's friend then does the voiceover from the article list.  The images from each article are compiled into a slideshow-style video for YouTube. You'll hear how they cross-promote their content and collaborate with various YouTube channels. Syed says that YouTube was an experiment that turned out to be great. They now plan to put more thought into the video layout. Listen to the show to hear how the YouTube channel drives people back to the website. Lessons learned about these two very different websites Syed states that with List25, you can't control what is said. There is so much up for debate. You can only moderate it or facilitate the discussion; whereas with WPBeginner, you can engage with users and help them out. You'll find out why WPBeginner is easier to manage. The reason that List25 has grown a lot faster is because Syed has a network of power users on different social media networks. He understands the game of making it go viral. Listen to the show to find out why List25 is about stirring people's emotions, whereas WPBeginner has a more practical approach. High-frequency content versus low-frequency, high-quality content Syed says it all depends on your audience. On his personal blog he writes once or twice a week, on WPBeginner he writes once a day and on List25, they publish multiple articles a day. It depends on the model you have and what your goals are.  Articles are published once a day on WPBeginner. If you're a small business, a coach or in a specific industry, Syed advises you to create low-frequency, high-quality content. However, if you have a site where your primary means of revenue is display advertisement, you've got to get more page views. This means you have to provide high-frequency content. You need to provide your audience with multiple articles. Listen to the show to find out why it's important to stay relevant with high-frequency content. Survival Tip: How to Use Testimonials in Your MarketingRecently I've created a new video series. I want to share with you three simple steps for using testimonials in your marketing and why they are super-powerful forms of marketing. We did testimonials at Social Media Marketing World this year and we will use them to sell next year's conference.
Here are three simple steps for getting successful testimonials. 1. Obtain exit surveys through audio endorsements and video. This is very easy to do. You can use a survey system like SurveyMonkey. The two questions you need to ask are, "Would you recommend this to a friend or colleague?" and "If you were recommending this to a friend or colleague, what would you say?" You'll find out why these questions are so important. Another powerful form of testimonial is to record someone who can recommend whatever it is you have to offer. You'll hear a testimonial clip from Mari Smith at Social Media Marketing World. When you ask for a testimonial via video, you need to let the interviewee speak first and then always ask a follow-on question. It's the key part of the testimonial. 2. Go through and identify the good testimonials that you might want to use. 3. Pull it all together. You'll find out how we put all the video clips together to make one amazing video testimonial. Call in and leave your social media–related questions for us and we may include them in a future show. Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how this works for you. Other Show Mentions
The conference features more than 60 sessions in four major tracks: social tactics, social strategy, community management and content marketing. Click here to see the full clip of all the great video testimonials we put together for Social Media Marketing World. It's a 10-minute video, which includes a lot of people you respect such as Chris Brogan, Mari Smith and many others, who thought this was one of the best conferences they had ever been to. I suggest you check it out. Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:Ways to subscribe to the Social Media Marketing podcast: What do you think? What are your thoughts on building a mega-following? Please leave your comments below. 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 Blog Growth: How to Build a Mega-Following appeared first on Make Money Online With Twitter Marketing. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| 4 Social Media Tools to Improve Your Social Media Marketing Posted: 10 Mar 2014 03:00 AM PDT By Alex Manthei
Are you looking for tools to speed up your social tasks? In this article, I'll share four social media tools and tips to help community managers save time, show creativity and streamline community management for their companies. Why Social Media ToolsCommunity managers for organizations of all sizes are tasked to cover everything from curating content to creating it. Customer support, marketing, Vine and webinars all fall into the mix. The sheer volume of tasks can be overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be. With just a few tools, individuals and teams can manage their responsibilities better, while presenting a successful social media presence. Keep reading for four social media tools that will make your social media tasks much easier. #1: Manage the Appearance of Links to Your Website With Facebook DebuggerWe all know Facebook updates that include pictures and snippets of their content do unbelievably better than ones that publish bare links. We're a visual bunch, us humans. Has this ever happened to you? You updated a page on your website with new images. Then, when you tried to publish a link to the page on Facebook, you found yourself staring at the link text for way too long.  If Facebook has trouble finding an image to include with your link, the preview can take a long time to show up. After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, you ended up with a link that looks an awful lot like the link text.  This link leads to a page that hasn't been debugged. There are times when you'll need to debug the links you want to share. Learning how to force Facebook to refresh its cache of your site is a rite of passage for social media pros. Once you know how, you'll want to tell everyone how to do it! When you add content and images to a webpage, use the Facebook Debugger to make Facebook update its information for the link.  Use the Facebook Debugger to refresh the cache on Facebook. After you enter the link in question, Facebook will publish the image you added to the page, alongside your link.  This is how the same link previewed after I put the link through the Facebook Debugger. Bookmark the Facebook Debugger for quick and easy access, and your links will include an image in the preview each time you update a web page. #2: Create Your Own GIFs With GIFBreweryGIFs are "in" right now, and for good reason. Brands use these mini-clips/short demos/video previews to communicate emotion and engage their communities. Because GIFs often have a choppy, raw quality to them—they can even be pretty arty—they add a human touch to your marketing. GIFs are also incredibly lightweight, which makes them perfect for emails. They add an animated element to an otherwise static medium. Gone are the days of complex frame extracting and layer fiddling on Photoshop. GIFBrewery lets you quickly and effortlessly convert small video clips into GIFs, with almost no technical or animation skill. In fact, you can create high-quality, original GIFs in about 2 minutes or less. Here's how it works. Use QuickTime's Screen Recording option to capture a short demonstration of your app, a brief clip of how to use a tricky new product feature or a workflow tip to share with your community.  Create a quick screen recording, then use GIFBrewery to make it into a glorious GIF. Then use GIFBrewery to convert the video into a GIF.  GIFBrewery has a slick, simple interface that takes just minutes to learn. InVision, the free prototyping and collaboration tool for design teams, has definitely got this trick down. They sent out this newsletter the other day. It shows you just how powerful a GIF can be, when it comes to immediately summing up a new feature. Don't worry, this is some pretty advanced stuff (don't expect these results your first time). With GIFBrewery, you can get similar results without much effort.  InVision perfectly pulls off the use of a GIF to tell how to use a new feature. GIFBrewery has a number of useful features and is available from the Mac App Store for $4.99. Want to get more creative with it? Use it to create GIFs for Twitter replies, animated team portraits for your About page or to introduce a longer video over social media. No Mac? No problem. Android users can create GIFs using GIFDroid. #3: Set Up a GIF Database on TumblrNow that you've got all these awesome GIFs, you need to make sure your community management team can access them at a moment's notice. Tumblr is the perfect platform for this. Famous for sharing animated GIFs, Tumblr also lets you create password-protected blogs and grant access to multiple users—perfect for your team.  Tumblr's protected blogs allow for multiple users. Load or reblog the GIFs that fit your brand's tone to your protected blog, and your whole team can access what they need from anywhere. #4: Automate Community Management Tasks With ZapierHave you ever thought to yourself, "Whenever X happens, I always have to do Y. I wish I could make that happen on its own." Wish no more—welcome to the future of the automated Internet! One of the fastest and most powerful ways to streamline your community management workflow is to use a service like Zapier to automate your social media–related tasks.  Use Zapier to streamline your social media workflow. Zapier integrates directly with over 250 other apps through what they call zaps, "a connection between two apps that automates time-consuming tasks." While you can spend hours going through the site and getting inspired by new app connections, here's just one way I use Zapier every day to make my community management an automatic breeze. I have all of my scheduled Buffer posts set to be immediately added to our Google calendar so everyone on my team can keep track of when I post what.  Use Zapier to automatically add scheduled social updates to your Google calendar. Zapier ties these services together, asking your permission to allow it to act as a sort of bridge between them. This is such a powerful tool. Bringing services together can cut down a variety of repetitive tasks. Consider using Zapier to help you and your team work better… and smarter. Conclusion Social media community management is a high-volume, fast-paced undertaking. As your brand grows, so do the number of social media profiles, tasks and demands for original content. As the size of your community management team grows, so does the need for tools to help streamline the workflow. Use the tips and tools in this article as a starting point to help you manage how links to your website appear on Facebook, create content that supports your brand and automate repetitive tasks. What do you think? How do you streamline your day-to-day process of creatively engaging with users? What tools can you share? Leave your questions and comments in the box below. 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 4 Social Media Tools to Improve Your Social Media Marketing appeared first on Make Money Online With Twitter Marketing. |
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