by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
The whole purpose of social media is to socialize and connect, right? For marketers and business owners, the opportunity of having your content shared throughout the social media world is very exciting. Never before have business owners and marketers had easier access to this kind of word-of-mouth marketing channels. But to be totally successful at it, you must find the influencers, the "big fish".
One of the best tools around is WeFollow.com. On there you can search keywords and find the "biggest fish" in Twitter's pond. And you can bet that if they are influential on Twitter, they will have siginifcant influence on other online networks as well. Your challenge is to get their attention. To do this you mus spend some time researching ad finding what will make them introduce your business and or your product(s) to their audience. Once you do that, you are good to go.
Next week we will look at how to ask questions and react to your customers, clients and fans on social media. |
by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
Tiny URLs are everywhere you look. You see bit.ly, ow.ly and is.gd. Typically, short URLs contain random numbers and letters (both lower and upper-case). What you do not see much are businesses taking advantage of the custom option, where instead of just having random numbers and characters, a keyword or phrase can bee added to the end of the link. Doing this provides a huge opportunity to stand out among the sea of small, indecipherable links.
By custominzing these tiny URLs, you can accomplish two goals. First, it will provide immediate information to the end user. They know what to expect before clicking the link and actual words have a way of drawing the eye to a link. Second, you build trust and a sense of professionalism with users. The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the looming SPAM and security threat of small links - you never know what you are going to get and that poses a problem. It takes just one bad experience to feed this distrust and fear, especially when it comes to social media.
If you really want to create a branded experience, consider hosting a URL-shortening service branded specifically for your business. Some companies offering this include Yourls (http://yourls.org), Shorty (http://get-shorty.com) and Awe.smly.awe.sm) (http://total. From these sites instead of a link like http://tinyurl.com/X36npZ, you can use http://yourdomain.com/product.
Next week we will look at how to reel in big fish to help you promote your company. |
by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
Finding a base audience on social networks is fairly easy as users are inclined to test you out on social media, so they are not afraid of becoming a fan or following an account out of sheer curiosity. Keeping that audience once you have them is the hard part.
Remember that social media is largely about entertainment - you must mix things up to keep your account fresh and relevant to your audience. Facebook allows for the inclusion of video, audio and photos on updates - take advantage of that. If you are using Twitter, try to provide links to various forms of media. Don't be afraid to promote content other than your own. If you think that something would be of interest to your followers/fans, then post it. That sets you up as an expert in your field and will keep them coming back. Keep in mind, you don't want to promote the competition, but occasional tidbits from other industry sources or just entertaining content will keep users engaged and position you as as a participant and not a pusher.
Net week we will look at how to customize tiny URLs. |
by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
A great deal of what you will read when researching social media is vague strategies to reach and engage customers. Keep in mind, there is plenty more that can be done. Each networks provides avenues via which a business can market their brands, products and services. So how do you put those strategies in motion to become a better social media marketer.
Search Keywords Before Updating
With the implementation this year of Google and Bing indexing real-time information on the Web, it is more important than ever to optimize your social network updates - Facebook status updates, tweets, blog posts, etc. Just like you would be sure to include keywords in blog post titles, ad copy and image descriptions, do the same on your social media profiles.
Look for trending topics and adpat them to fit your updates (within reason). Take advantages of hashtags and keywords on Twitter and be sure to repeat keywords and phrases in the copy of your updates as well as in the title.
Where can you find hot topics? Try Topsy.com to find the latest Twitter trending topics along with CrowdEye.com. OneRiot.com promotes itself as a real-time Web search engine and SocialMention.com lets you search across blogs, networks and more and also set up social e-mail alerts. SwingVine.com tracks interactions with trending topics among its members and provides news items of those topics - good for staying on top of trends with heavy social media users.
Next week we will look at how to mix up content offerings to keep your audience. |
by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
Social media and social networking sites are the Web's hottest trends. What is changing, is how social networks are being used by businesses and how social media is affecting branding and consumer interaction. The web has opened up a pipeline to consumers and any size business can take advantage of this opportunity. May businesses have seed wild success utilizing social media and others have failed miserably. Now is the time to get involved, if you're not already. If you are already involved, now is the time to build a social media strategy.
In our How To Build An Audience article last week, we looked at how to use social media to build an audience.
This week, we are going to look at how to measure and refine social media.
Measure and Refine
Every Internet marketer will tell you that measuring social media is very difficult, if not impossible. They are somewhat wrong on that. It is true that social media is lagging behind when it comes to analytics, but that does not mean you can't measure success and failures.
Take advantage of URL-shortening services when you post links on social media that provide analytics, such as the number of clicks and where those clicks originated. Some popular URL-shortening services are:
Even the simplest analytics from providers like Google can show successes (or failures) in the social space. Look for traffic originating from these networks. Are these visitors spending a lot of time on your site? Are they clicking on other pages? Are the repeat visitors? Are their bounce rates low? These are all indications that you are doing something right and you should continue focusing on these sites.
Another way to measure is if you offer a special code or sale via a social media platform and that is the only place it was available. By tracking how many people sign up or use the code, you can see if the offer was successful.
Next week we will look at keywords and how they play a role in social media. |
|
