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Social media is a tremendous opportunity to build your company’s brand, exposure, sales, and customer-loyalty…not necessarily in that order! But regardless, it’s an incredibly important aspect of your overall Online Marketing mix that needs to be handled and looked after by people who are going to take pride in the management and strategy that’s implemented. You need a real rock star running your social media strategy or it won’t be as effective as it should be. Lame people just don’t work for social media! I personally don’t think this aspect of your corporate strategy should be outsourced to an agency (except ours) because the staff they put on the project isn’t likely proactive enough, friendly enough, or customer service oriented enough to do a great job. You social media management is just that important! I have seen countless examples in the past year or so where companies are outsourcing social media when they could do it much better internally with the right people and principles in place. I have put together some social media management principles which should take no more than an hour a day to accomplish and do a tremendous job!
1. First you have to decide what staff you can allocate to the project. Who will be posting and who will be monitoring. You want to coordinate your efforts and ideas. You should meet weekly for a ½ hour and discuss what the strategy is. Make sure they are friendly and outgoing with a really positive, up-beat attitude. Once you have a great social media strategy in place you can start running it like a rock star!
2. Sign up for a Ping.fm account and set-up your Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account to receive the posts. That way you can post once and it will go on multiple social networks. Ping.fm holds over 30 social networks but only a few are really necessary in my opinion. But you should make sure your company is signed up for most of the social networks out there that Ping.fm posts to.
3. Decide how many posts per day and who will be posting them. I recommend 5 a day, but you can do more if you have enough valuable content to share and it’s working well getting people to interact. Posting suggestions:
- 1 unique article a day focusing on tips from your blog (outsource your article writing or write internally). Link to suggested products from the blog post with a special offer or coupon promotion.
- Poll your Fans once a day, ie “What is your favorite thing to do in the Summer?” or “where do you like to travel during your summer vacation?”..stuff like that related to your company niche or in general. Then monitor for replies and Likes. Answer replies and thank for likes immediately. Keep the conversation going every time.
- 1 Featured product post per day from your site or on a service you provide, with a special offer included.
- 1 quote per day from a respected authority in your field. Always ask, “What does everyone think about that?”
- Posting an article from a respected 3rd party source is OK too, as long as it’s not a competitor obviously.
4. Use Hootsuite to monitor the responses to your posts and to respond quicker. It’s a great tool for managing multiple social networking accounts and staying completely on top of all the conversations going on. Response-time is everything! Don’t wait to respond, do it immediately! People love that.
5. Answer all posts by Fans to your wall immediately, including nights and weekend! (It usually take a couple seconds) If you aren’t committed to being there whenever you need to be then find someone that will. It takes 2 seconds to respond to a wall comment or tweet response, so make sure your phone is set-up to notify you of them as they happen so you can be as responsive as possible. Agencies surely won’t be working nights and weekends monitoring and responding. The Internet never sleeps, so don’t put a typical 9 to 5′er on it. Or you can put a few people on monitoring the responses and wall posts, including customer service agents once they are trained how to respond.
6. Run Monthly contests using tools like Wild Fire App and Woobox to build your fans and increase viral sharing. Choose a monthly sweepstakes or contest budget and plan ahead of time to roll it out and do it professionally. Sweepstakes can be sent to all your customers with a nice HTML email stating, “Enter the [companname] May Sweepstakes for a chance to win a $500 shopping spree!” Or whatever prize you think will get people’s attention like an iPad. This should be promoted to your customers via email and on your Order Confirmation page and confirmation email. You can also design a graphic and promote it on your site to capture more visitor information into the sweepstakes or contest. Wild Fire App has a really cool website footer bar that all your site visitors will see so they can enter the sweepstakes or contest. Woobox is nice because people can gain more entries into the sweepstakes by having their friends enter, which makes it go more viral. Sweepstakes and contests are an absolute MUST to build your fans and go viral, otherwise it will grow painfully slowly.
7. Social sharing of blog posts – once a new blog post is added to the site’s blog, set about syndicating it socially. Here is a an article of mine with some content syndication and sharing tips.
8. Facebook Advertising – run a small, controlled Facebook Fan advertising campaign targeting your demographic and competitors companies in Likes and Interests. See how many fans it builds and then scale accordingly. You can NEVER have too many targeted fans. Quality is everything with fans.
9. Interact and Engage – be very proactive your your social media management using every opportunity to interact with fan and engage with them. This is how loyalty is built! Keep up the hype and excitement, there is nothing worse than boring fan page postings.
10. Join Fan Pages – your social media managers should be fans of 100′s of other company’s fan pages themselves so they can get good posting and interacting ideas. Join some of your biggest competitors fan pages and other big brands, since they are usually on the cutting-edge because they have staff and resources to put behind it.
Social media management should be handled in-house by caring, friendly, proactive staff that want to do a great job and represent your company to the fullest. If you outsource this, you are at the mercy of whomever the agency puts on the task and that person may or may not be any good or have a good strategy in place. An internal staff member can definitely do a phenomenal job at managing your social media with a few great strategies in place and a willingness to do a good job for the company. Make sure they have some writing skills and keep tabs on their posts so they are consistently excellent. If you just don’t have the internal resources then you might have to outsource, but otherwise allocate some of your resources to focusing on your social media and watch it grow and be fruitful for you! Thanks and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. Thanks!
WildFire is a tremendous advancement in building customer loyalty/retention, growing your Facebook Fans, and increasing viral exposure for your company and brand. I have been using the Wildfire campaign builder for the last year with my own company and our clients. Wildfire will allow you to run all types of sweepstakes and contests to your customers and also on your website to your traffic, which can increase your conversion rate. They have an easy to use wizard for setting up your contest or sweepstakes and it’s dirt cheap to use their platform. You can run a simple ‘Win an iPad from [companyname]” or a $500 shopping spree, etc..you can also run video contests and photo contests which people on Facebook can then vote on which makes it go viral. You can actually run 8 different types of contests and promotions. Everything is compliant with Facebook’s regulations.
What I love about the sweepstakes and contest running is that it rockets your Fans on Facebook like nothing I have ever seen. Once you set-up your sweepstakes or contest, you can promote in a variety of ways including: HTML email to your customer file, on your Thank You page (Order Confirmation), add it to your auto-responder emails, create a page in your Fan Page, promote it to your Fans, and even launch a graphic for the promotion in your website’s layout, which will allow you capture more of your site visitors contact information AND get them to Like your Fan Page. Once people enter the promotion it’s posted to their Facebook Wall so all their friends see it, and they can invite some friends from Facebook to check it out after they submit their entry. Wow…there is nothing else out there that can increase the excitement and hype around your company like running a contest or sweepstakes. Don’t be cheap with your prizes as more people will participate the juicer it is. I highly recommend you make WildFire part of your monthly online marketing strategy. Not only will it rocket your Fans, but it will allow your brand to go viral, and also increase your conversion rate when you remarket to the people that enter the promotion and their friends. WildFire is exploding as a company as you can see in the video above. Let me know if you would like to consult with me on your promotion/sweepstakes strategies. Ask to speak to Evan when you call the phone number at the top of this website. I can be hired as an your online marketing consult on a monthly retainer basis. Thanks and have a great week!
Facebook has quickly become the dominant social network on the Internet landscape, so you absolutely have to be leveraging Facebook for all you can as a business, website owner, or blogger. Facebook keeps changing, so you have to stay on top of what you can do to maximize your presence on Facebook to generate as much traffic and exposure as possible. Facebook represents the best way for your content to go viral and snare in throngs of people you can communicate with around your brand or site. I don’t think you can ever have enough resources devoted to your social media strategy, but Facebook is definitely where you want to spend the major of your time and money promoting your site or company. Here are some of the top ways to maximize Facebook for your company, website or blog:
1. Social Plug-ins – Facebook has continued to evolve their “social plugins” which allow you to tie Facebook into your site in several ways. I think the most important one right now is the site commenting plug-in that allows people to comment on your site’s content and then shares it to their Facebook Wall. Another great one is the automatic site registration, I see a lot of advanced sites using that. The Like button on all your product details pages or blog posts is a must. This is an incredibly powerful way to help your site or blog go viral. Here is the complete list of current Facebook Social Plug-ins. Social plugins are a must and should be integrated into your website everywhere possible, as long as it’s called for.
2. Fan Page Management – If you are a business, website, or blogger, you absolutely need to run and administrate your Facebook Fan Page. Once you have your Fan Page set-up you are ready to recruit fans by getting it out in front of people. But how should the Fan Page actually be managed and by whom? That’s surprisingly a tough question. You can handle it internally or outsource your Fan Page management, but whoever is assigned to it needs to be the right person with the right strategy. Fan Page management should be done with a very pro-active, friendly, informative, and interactive approach, otherwise you won’t be able to solicit your fans to comment, share or like your content, which is squandering the entire opportunity. For instance, if you post a quote from Albert Einstein, you should ask “what do you all think about this quote?” after the quote to provoke a response. Remember, the more interaction and responses you provoke, the more people will actually see your content on friends’ Walls and potentially interact with it themselves or share it to their Wall. I’m pretty fussy about Fan Page management in general, I don’t think 99% of companies do it very well, which is most likely just that their strategy and technique isn’t as interactive or engaging as it could be, nothing personal. If you are a fan of a lot of companies you probably know what I mean. So make sure you have really friendly, out-going, amazingly interactive and pro-active people managing and posting to your Fan Page. Frequency depends on your overall strategy, but I think in general 5-10 posts a day is a good amount, as long as they are purposeful and relevant posts. Don’t post just to post, but frequent posting is recommended.
3. Facebook Sweepstakes and Contests – one of the best things you can do to pump up your Fan Page and inspire new fans is to run sweepstakes and contests. People love to enter sweepstakes and contests to win things, especially online, and especially if it’s quick and easy to do so. I love a Facebook App provider called Wild Fire, which allows you to run 8 different types of contests and sweepstakes for a nominal fee. They handle all the tracking and reporting which is amazing, and they also give you the data of the people that entered your promotion. Some of the cool features of Wild Fire are that when someone enters they are asked to Like your Fan Page, post it to their Wall, and then they can send a few invited to their friends….all of which helps it go viral! I recommend running monthly contests to our clients and don’t be cheap! The better the prizes, the more uptake it will get and chances to go viral.
4. Encouraging Customers to Fan – Most companies have databases of customers, subscribers, referrals, and other types of databases that have been acquired of the years. Whatever your database sizes, you should absolute send them a nice email piece encouraging them to join your Facebook Fan Page. It definitely helps to offer some kind of incentive to increase their likelihood of become a fan, but in general this should be done periodically to your entire database to build fans. Try to be creative with it. Definitely include join our fan page verbiage in your weekly/monthly newsletters as well. If your website sends out any types of auto-responder emails, you can integrate “Join our Facebook Fan Page” copy or graphical buttons to make the suggestion. Also, incorporating this same type of thing into your Order Confirmation or Thank You pages can be effective at increasing your rate of uptake when acquiring new fans. Leave no stone unturned when incorporating this type of suggestion into the fabric of what you do. Companies like 500Friends, on the pre-transaction side, and CureBit, on the post-transactional side, can turn new customers into instant advocates and promotion spreaders. I definitely encourage merchants to check out these companies (and mention I recommended it!).
5. Facebook Advertising – Facebook advertising represents the greatest opportunity to target your products or company in general to the Facebook audience. They have excellent targeting options that allow you to hone in on your ideal customer and advertise directly to them. For instance, if you are a flower shop in Fort lauderdale, Florida, you can advertise to males, between the ages of 30-50, that live in Fort Lauderdale zip codes. People who you think would buy flowers locally. You can also do this nationally and get more broad with it. You can also include targeting by people’s Likes and Interests on Facebook to further specify the types of people you want to see your ads. Facebook advertising is on a cost-per-click (like Google paid search) or a CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions). It’s debatable which works best, but regardless you should be tracking all the clicks with electronic tracking or sending them to a special page to see a promotion for Facebook visitors. That way, you can tell whether the business came from Facebook ads and gauge your ROI (return on investment of the campaign). Once you know your ROI you will know what you can afford to spend to generate more customers to your website. In order to make this type of advertising work most effectively you have to do things like: offer special promotions, vary/rotate ad copy, vary ad images, and split-test your landing pages. I recommend using a website optimization tool like Optimizely to increase your website’s conversion rate prior to advertising on Facebook and spending the money.
6. Fan Page Advertising – You can also advertise specifically for Fans on Facebook. This is another great way to build your overall fans and should be running every month to some extent, whether it be a little or a lot. You can never have too many good, targeted fans. It’s said that fans spend 4x as much as non-fans, so that’s all the reason in the world to advertise for fans on Facebook. Again, you can really target who will see you ads. I sort of classify this under branding, with sales attached at a later date, because your ROI to acquire new fans can’t really be measured right away. But it’s still a great thing to do in my opinion and every company should budget a certain amount per month towards advertiser for fans. Like anything you are putting money towards, it has to be managed and worked to get the most out of it and how effectively that’s done is up to whomever you have manage it.
7. Sponsored Stories – Sponsored Stories are the latest thing Facebook has rolled out for advertisers. Here is a live Webinar overview of Sponsored Stories and how it works. I just started advertising through it so I don’t know how effective it will be but it look like it has a ton of potential to open up more targeted advertising.
8. Fan Messaging and Marketing – Once you have your fans built up you can start messaging them through your Fan Page Admin area under Marketing. You can send them all an email with a message, promotion, and links to whatever you want. Keep it in moderation though and don’t get nuts with it or you will alienate people. When you decide to run your contest or sweepstakes you can email all your fans and let them know about it, as well as posting a status update with a link to the promotion. There’s also a Facebook fan invite feature in the admin area, where if you have a csv file of a database it will tell you who is already on Facebook and send them an invite to you fan page. You should have some kind of strategy for when you message you fans and have a purpose behind it or it won’t really be as effective as it can be.
9. Facebook Strategy – If you have a Fan Page you should definitely have a concrete, flexible strategy in place to maximize your presence. Every month (or week even) your strategy should be changing and adjusting based on the previous months results, gauging whether you were either too aggressive or too conservative with your spends and resources you have allocated to it. Make it part of your weekly meetings with your executives or staff, and most definitely make it the primary focus right behind your Search strategy.
10. Looking Ahead – Facebook is changing and evolving on a daily basis, so you have to stay on the cutting-edge of what can be done on Facebook to maximize your presence. Staying up with sources like Mashable is essential to evolving your own strategy based on what’s working for companies, case studies, and new technologies for instance. Stay up to date with social media news and you will always be coming up with new ideas to grow your own social presence.
Facebook is an ever-evolving platform that is the dominant player in social networking, so you have no choice but to completely embrace it and work it to maximize what you can do there to make your brand more pervasive. These are some ideas that have worked for me, but there is ALWAYS more that can be done in this day and age. I encourage you to focus you efforts on maximize your social presence because it’s always a work in progress that should get a little bit (or a lot) bigger every month. Thanks for reading and let me know what you think!!
I like to provide a lot of social media and social networking strategies to people, but what is it that really makes all that time and effort posting and sharing your content really effective? Social Networking Karma! So what is Social Networking Karma and how can you use it to make your online social networking more effective? I’m going to explain how your way of “being” and acting impacts the effectiveness of your social networking. The best sites to social network on, right now away, are Facebook and Twitter. Most everyone has a presence on those sites and spends the vast majority of their time there checking status updates and tweets. So obviously that’s where you should be hanging out primarily in order to touch as many contacts and friends as possible with your own content. Online forums are also great places to post and interact with others. If you know me, you know that I advocate posting a lot of original content on a frequent basis, and then sharing/syndicating your content socially through networking and bookmarking. But in order to make it really kick in and work for you you have to have a really loyal base of friends and followers that are willing to interact with your content and share it themselves. The way to achieve that is through pro-actively interacting with other people’s content and status updates so they become more likely to interact with yours.
I don’t think most people by nature are inclined to interact with other people’s postings socially unless they are really close to that person or find it super-compelling, so the way to overcome peoples’ lack of willingness to respond in some way to your postings is to interact with their postings first! I know this sounds somewhat commonsensical, but I know from social networking for several years that it just doesn’t happen by itself. I spend part of every morning, usually first thing, scanning through my Facebook status updates looking for anything I can either Like, Comment on, or Share on my Wall. I also go back to Facebook throughout the day to check all the new postings so I can interact. Since I’m connected to quite a few people and follow a lot of Fan Pages, it isn’t hard to find informative or interesting postings to interact with. You have to decide what you want to interact with and what you don’t. I don’t think everything should be interacted with, but definitely what’s appropriate in your mind. If it’s business oriented I usually interact with it. Family stuff sometimes but far less frequently because I’m using Facebook with business goals in mind. Every time I engage with someone else’s postings I build a little but more Social Karma with that person, making them more likely to reciprocate and interact with my postings, which increases my content’s exposure to their friends. Not to mention they like me personally a little more because I took the time to interact with their posting. Similarly on Twitter, I scan the updates and look for interesting posts I can retweet or reply to. Every time I do this I gain a little bit more social karma with people, making them more likely to interact with my stuff which gains additional exposure.
Social Networking in general tends to have a positive, upbeat tone to it, so when you are interacting with other people’s content or posting your own, you should do it with a really upbeat and friendly nature. No one wants to read depressing posts or be interacted with negatively, it’s just human nature. The nice thing about social networking is it’s really a great opportunity to uplift, encourage, motivate, and reinforce others acheivements and accomplishments, so definitely make sure to chime in when you see great stuff happening for your friends and followers. And if the news isn’t good then you can comfort and be there for them in your response. It’s also a great opportunity to show people that you aren’t selfish since you took the time to respond their posting. I think most people get so caught up in posting their own content and thoughts that they don’t take the time to interact with other peoples postings. But if you make a concerted effort to proactively interactive with other people’s content you will find them interacting with yours, which will make your efforts more effective! In fact, you should spend MORE time interacting with others than posting your own content. That’s as plain as I can say it. I hope you liked this little mini-article on social networking karma…now go out and make it happen!
Social media is a tremendous opportunity to build your company’s brand, exposure, sales, and customer-loyalty…not necessarily in that order! But regardless, it’s an incredibly important aspect of your overall Online Marketing mix that needs to be handled and looked after by people who are going to take pride in the management and strategy that’s implemented. I personally don’t think this aspect of your corporate strategy should be outsourced to an agency because the staff they put on the project isn’t likely proactive enough, friendly enough, or customer service oriented enough to do a great job. You social media management is just that important! I have seen countless examples in the past 6 months where companies are outsourcing social media when they could do it much better internally with the right principles in place. I have put together some social media management principles which should take no more than an hour a day to accomplish and do a trenendous job!
1. First you have to decide what staff you can allocate to the project. Who will be posting and who will be monitoring. You want to coordinate your efforts and ideas. You should meet weekly for a ½ hour and what the strategy is. Make sure they are friendly and outgoing with a positive attitude.
2. Sign up for a Ping.fm account and set-up your Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account to receive the posts. That way you can post once and it will go on multiple social networks. Ping.fm holds over 30 social networks but only a few are really necessary in my opinion.
3. Decide how many posts per day and who will be posting them. I recommend 5 a day, but you can do more if you have enough valuable content to share and it’s working well getting people to interact. Posting suggestions:
- 1 unique article a day focusing on tips from your blog (outsource your article writing or write internally). Link to suggested products from the blog post with a special offer or coupon promotion.
- Poll your Fans once a day, ie “What is your favorite thing to do in the Summer?” or “where do you like to travel during your summer vacation?”..stuff like that related to your company niche or in general. Then monitor for replies and Likes. Answer replies and thank for likes immediately.
- 1 Featured product post per day from your site or on a service you provide, with a special offer included.
- 1 quote per day from a respected authority in your field. Always ask, “What does everyone think about that?”
- Posting an article from a respected 3rd party source is OK too, as long as it’s not a competitor obviously.
4. Use Hootsuite to monitor the responses to your posts and to respond quicker.
5. Answer all proactive posts to your Fan wall by fans immediately, including weekends! If you aren’t committed to being there whenever you need to be then find someone that will. Agencies surely won’t be working nights and weekends monitoring and responding. The Internet never sleeps, so don’t put a typical 9 to 5er on it.
6. Run Monthly contests using Wild Fire App to build your fans and increase viral sharing. Choose a monthly sweepstakes or contest budget and plan ahead of time to roll it out and do it professionally. Sweepstakes can be sent to all your customers with a nice HTML email stating, “Enter the [companname] May Sweepstakes for a chance to win a $500 shopping spree!” Or whatever prize you think will get people’s attention like an iPad. This should be promoted to your customers via email and on your Order Confirmation page and confirmation email. You can also design a graphic and promote it on your site to capture more visitor information into the sweepstakes or contest.
7. Social sharing of blog posts – once a new blog post is added to the site’s blog, set about syndicating it socially. Here is an article I wrote on content syndication: My link and My link
8. Facebook Advertising – run a small, controlled Facebook advertising campaign targeting your demographic and competitors companies in Likes and Interests. See how many fans it builds and then scale accordingly. You can NEVER have too many targeted fans.
9. Message your Fans through the Edit Page button, then Marketing section, once per week with some weekly special offers and sweepstakes promotions.
10. Interact and Engage – be very proactive your your social media management using every opportunity to interact with fan and engage with them. This is how loyalty is built! Keep up the hype and excitement, there is nothing worse than boring fan page postings.
Social media management should be handled in-house by caring, friendly, proactive staff that want to do a great job and represent your company to the fullest. If you outsource this, you are at the mercy of whomever the agency puts on the task and that person may or may not be any good or have a good strategy in place. An internal staff member can definitely do a phenomenal job at managing your social media with a few great strategies in place and a willingness to do a good job for the company. Make sure they have some writing skills and keep tabs on their posts so they are consistently excellent. If you just don’t have the internal resources then you might have to outsource, but otherwise allocate some of your resources to focusing on your social media and watch it grow and be fruitful for you! Thanks and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. Thanks!
Hi there! Social networking has engulfed our lives, so why not maximize your presence and reach on the social networks, since you spend time there anyways. Not to mention how incredibly powerful the social networks are at reaching people. Before the days of Facebook and Twitter, there was Plaxo and Linkedin, which started as simply ways of exchanging contact information and vcards. Personally, I embraced these technologies because at the time I was very into business development and connecting with people to promote the company I was with at the time. But I definitely saw the potential and tried to maximize them for all they were worth, which resulted in acquiring a lot of contacts over the years. Nowadays, Facebook and Twitter dominate the landscape and LinkedIn has stepped its game up recently, Plaxo too but much less used, although still useful. Here are some good ways to ramp up your social networking activities to better take advantage of the opportunity:
1. Social Karma – I’m sure this term is being used for something, but I like to use “social karma” to describe what happens reciprocally when you proactively interact with other people’s social postings and status updates. Facebook and Twitter have forced people to interact socially online and will continue to compel people to be online more because this is how they make more money. I have found, through being a proactive social networker, that the more you interact with others doing things like: Liking, Sharing, Commenting, and Retweeting of their content and postings, the more they will return the favor when you post something. Usually the more compelling a post it is the more likely it will be interacted with, but in general the more you make the effort the more that will be returned, which exposes your content to their streams. In my opinion you can never be proactive enough with your friends and followers. It’s something that has to be focused on and made part of your daily routine. Once you start really interacting proactively with others, you will see them return the favor and your content will be shared to more people.
2. Adding Friends – All the social networks have made it pretty easy to add friends and contacts to your social profiles. You can even connect network with network and cross-invite people to your networks. One of the best ways to ramp your connections is using the Add Friends from your email contact list. This can pull a huge list into your invites and blasts them all an invitation. You may need to clean out the people in your invite list you don’t want to connect with socially. You can also add friends right on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as most other networks, that you see suggested to you or that other people are connected to. Be outgoing and click Add Friend as much as possibly and you will build your friends quickly. On Twitter they have great search features for finding other people you can follow with similar interests, or that are following people you know. It does take time and effort, but well worth it.
3. Be Brilliant and Helpful – Most people use Facebook for sharing their personal and family stuff, which is great, so when you post business related or informational content on an industry it should be really compelling in order to peak people’s interest. There are always going to be some people you are connected to that don’t care about your business postings and will never interact, but there are plenty of people that might just interact if your content is either helpful, informational, or just plain brilliant. The more compelling your content is the more people will interact, but you can’t count on it happening, you just have to try hard and be as frequent to possible to illicit a response (but don’t post your same content repeatedly, maybe twice at the most). People also like helpful, informative articles that enhance their understanding of a subject or provide some new information they can become hip to. You should mix in a good amount of helpful articles into your stream so you’re not always self-promoting.
4. Fan Page – Everyone should operate their own Facebook Fan Page if not more than one. You should have one for your company, website, blog, group, organization, whatever it may be you should really focus on growing and building out your Fan Page. Fan Pages are great because they can really grow if people like your company/service or your content is good. Make sure to load up your photo section (quick content), videos if you have them, and really build out your Discussion area, as they tend to have great Google rankings. Fans can be advertised for as well. By running a Facebook advertising campaign you can add additional targeted fans that “like” certain core keyword phrases and entities. This does cost money, but is an awesome way to expand your reach and then get back in front of them with status updates and direct email messages. You can even make a nice custom Welcome Page for new fans that encourages them to click the Like button. So building up your Fan Page should be a really high priority for any business, website, or organization. You can never have too many fans!
5. Be Positive! – the world is filled with bad stuff happening and there is so much negativity out there these days, so make sure to have a great attitude and be positive when you are social networking. Put good energy out there into the social networking environment and people will jive with your good vibrations. It’s always a good idea to encourage people and be that uplifting voice that makes people feel good or better. Nobody likes gloom and doom on social networks…so be optimistic and excited with your social postings and people will gravitate towards you, not to mention share your content!
These are a few ways to maximize your social networking activities. I mean you are spending time there anyways, you might as well get the most out of it. Look at it like any part of your work day or productivity and try to increase your effectiveness and efficiency. The social networks will be working hard to force people to be on social networks more, so why not take advantage of that and ramp up your social networking! Thanks for reading, please let me know what you think by commenting below. Also, make sure to share this topic on your social networks. Have a great day!
So you have gotten to the point that you are cranking out several daily blog posts like a beast (or at least weekly, i.e. mini-beast status). Now, how to maximize each fresh content post for the largest exposure is the question! Here are some online places you should “bookmark” and share your post urls to maximize each piece of content:
After post is made in blog or page created on site, take the new post/article url from the address bar and do the following (or use Addthis browser extension):
1. Share on your Facebook Profile and your Fan Page, then ask, “what do you all think about this post?” Or something like that to spark interaction.
2. Share on Twitter same way. Put url through Bit.ly to gain valuable stats/info on the posting. Similar strategy but you have less characters to ask a question, but still attempt to do so or use the post title in the tweet.
3. Digg – submit url to Digg.com. Ask friends to Digg it for you on Facebook and Twitter after you submit.
4. Delicious – submit url to Delicious.com
5. Reddit – submit url to Reddit.com
6. LinkedIn – “Share” on Groups you are joined to. You can join up to 50 Groups on linkedin, you have to check whats there are in our niches…then join those groups so you can share into them (use Addthis browser extension to do this all at once on LinkedIn). Don’t be annoying with it though and be relevant.
7. Google +1 – post to your Google +1
8. Submit to StumbleUpon.com
9. Friendfeed – join and submit to Friendfeed
10. Rewrite the post and title completely and submit to ezinearticles.com, which links to your site in the footer.
These are some great ways to maximize your blogging and content production. Why post without sharing and bookmarking? One you get a good process in place it will go quickly. You can use services like AddThis to make bookmarking easier, they have a really nice Google Chrome extension you can download too!
Facebook represents the biggest opportunity maybe ever to interact with people, your customers, and others with whom you would like to start a relationship. Building your Facebook Fan Page is an absolute must in this day and age for any company, website owner, business owner, or blogger. You can never have too many fans because they always can be re-marketed to later with specials, promotions, and interesting news. Here are some great ways to build your Facebook Fan Page:
1. Advertising on Facebook – one of the best ways to build your Facebook Fans is to actually advertise on Facebook for fans. This is particularly effective because you can target your ads based on people’s Like and Interests, which makes it really targeted and relevant. Advertising for Fans costs money per click or per thousand ad impressions, so you have to make sure you control your budget and plan your strategy. I highly recommending keeping an ad campaign for Fans running at all times to keep up the branding and fan acquisition. You have to try various likes and interests to see which pulls fans best, and you should change up your targeting periodically because your ads can get burned out. So keep it fresh and it will pull Fans really well for you.
2. On Your Site – Promoting the Facebook Fan widget on your site is a great way to expose your Fan page content, with a Like button, right in the layout of your site. This works really well for blogs because most have a side bar that the widget can be dropped into relatively easily. Regular sites and drop the widget into their articles section sidebar. This allows you to capitalize more so on your web traffic and grow your Fan base. You can also drop the Facebook “Follow Us on Facebook” button on your site either in the header or footer and that will attract some fans for you as well.
3. Your Customers/Members/Subscribers – marketing your Facebook Fan Page to your actual customers or members is a must. You can send a dedicated email blast to all your current or previous customers/members and let them know to “Like” your Fan Page. You can run a Fan Page promotion or contest to your customers, subscribers, or members. Companies give away prizes and free merchandise to the winners of their contests and promotions, which will increase the number of Fans that enter to try to win. It’s usually effective because people are always trying to win something and it takes little effort usually to participate in the promotion.
4. Auto-responders – including a link to join your Fan Page in your website’s email auto-responders is a great idea because these emails are usually pretty basic without must substance other than thanking the customer for their purchase or thanking them for subscribing to the newsletters, so dropping a text link into these type of emails can take advantage of this opportunity to build your Fan base.
5. Messaging Your Facebook Friends – one of the of the easiest way to build your Fan is to ask your Facebook Friends to come and join your Fan Page. This can be done in the left column of your Fan Page by clicking “Suggest to Friends.” Doing this is a great way to really boost your Fan Page numbers. Also, you can suggest to your Fans and Friends that they do the same thing, which can really help it go viral.
6. Growing On Its Own – when you start employing all these methods for growing your Fans and they start clicking the Like button, their Friends will see this and could click Like as well. So the more you market your Fan Page, the more it can go viral by all the friends of your new Fans seeing this. Also, when you post status updates to your Fans and they click to Like, Comment, or Share your status update, their Friends will see that and could Like your Fan Page as well. Once you start promoting your Fan Page like crazy, this spill over effect will really increase and your Fan base will grow big time.
These are but a few ways to grow your Facebook Fans. Make sure to put a lot of planning and effort into growing your Fans and it will pay big dividends down the road. If you haven’t yet started your Fan Page, you can do so by clicking here. Now go out there and build out your Fans and start interacting!
Affiliate marketing is a great industry to be participating in if you own a website or blog…and who doesn’t these days! Why wouldn’t you want to earn commissions for referring customers from your website to an online retailer? Most people don’t realize, as they surf around the Internet, that they are triggering “cookies” and other forms of electronic tracking by visiting their favorite websites, but that’s exactly whats going on behind those click-throughs. Electronic affiliate tracking is how you are able to get compensated for referring business from your site to another. Every day, more and more people are becoming Affiliate Marketers and tapping into the Internet to generate extra income and even do really well financially with it. But how to maximize your time and efforts to be the most productive affiliate marketer you can be to make that money? Here are some quick tips to help maximize your productivity with your affiliate marketing:
1. Post is Multiple Venues – Most people surf around the Internet or on Facebook and just go about it in a fun loving way. Then there are people that spend their time online in more frenetic, productive way. Since 80% (give or take not including FB and Youtube) of Internet traffic still comes from search engines like Google, it’s imperative to leverage the search results as much as possible to get the traffic. This can be accomplished by posting content in a multitude of places about a particular subject or topic. There are many websites that will allow you to create a profile, like online forums, and some have blogs you can post content to. Other sites like Buzzle and EzineArticles are well-ranking article posting sites you can join as an author and link to your site from your articles. This can be very powerful because if you can post an original write-up on a bunch of 3rd party websites that rank well-to-decently in Google, you can achieve multiple search rankings for the same keyword phrase. I’m not advocating search engine spam, but leveraging unique content into multiple venues to gain more possible free search rankings. This isn’t a new concept, but one that has to be done with a lot of effort and strategy if you want it to pay off in traffic.
2. Become Prolific – Another key concept is becoming a prolific writer. The faster you write the more content you can produce and therefore the more pages you can create on your sites and other 3rd party sites. Over time, you can build up hundreds if not thousands of pages of content that will be picked up by the search engines and ranked somewhere in their search results. By keeping up a concerted effort with posting your content on your own sites, as well as 3rd party article directories and blogs, you can build out your own real estate on the Internet that never goes away. A key factor here is to post somewhat frequently to any site you maintain because it encourages the search engines to check back more frequently for your new content and can help you rank better. Another good thing to do is read a lot online and books, yes actual books! The more you read, the more styles of writing you will pick up on and it will help your own writing efforts and make it flow better. I always use Jimi Hendrix as my example of a prolific artist that recorded everything and was constantly producing new material, which is why there is a such a huge catalog of Hendrix recordings still coming to light 40 years later and he only was a star for about 4 years. I’m not advocating taking it to excess but definitely let composing content become part of your day to day lifestyle.
3. Be Social – Another thing I like to do is to Comments, Like, and Share other people’s status updates on Facebook, which can pay big dividends because when you post something others will be more likely to reciprocate. You can really get your content pushed out more broadly through people’s status updates by being a pro-active social networker. I’ve always been an out-going person, so for me it’s a natural fit to be a happy, active social networking, but not everyone is out-going and therefore you really have to push yourself to ramp up your interactions with other people on Facebook and Twitter. There are many ways to leverage social networks to get your content “out there” more. LinkedIn Groups is great for exposing your blog posts within the Groups themselves you are joined to. Becoming active in online forums is a must for a few reason like: you meet like-minded people, get links to your site from your signature when you post, and can get search rankings on topics you start on the forum. Maintaining a Facebook Fan Page is great too because you can gain fans (obviously) that you can expose your content to and message as well. Fan Page Discussions also tend to rank well in Google, so build that area of your fan page out. Following and commenting on blogs that relate to your niche is also very productive and great fun! Blogs are nice because you usually get a link to your site and it sends you an email when someone else comments so you can go and reply, therefore creating another link to your site! It’s also really nice to make friends with the bloggers that you comment on, which enhances the experience.
These are a few strategies to make you a more productive Affiliate Marketer. Like anything, the more effort you put into it the more you will inevitably get out of it. But if you go at it hard and put all of your extra time or free time into it, you will see that your content is being read more and your traffic will grow as a result. Make sure to place all your affiliate banners around your layout nicely so they are prominent. Let me know if you have any questions whatsoever about how to get going with affiliate programs or how to integrate the affiliate banners and links into your site. Thanks and have a great day!
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