What To Do on Twitter
Yesterday I shared briefly about how often to post on Facebook, today I wanted to share how many times to post and just provide short basic information on your posting style.
Frequency:
12-20 content posts, 5-10 personal posts, 5-10 RT’s/comments on others content
Details:
Content Posts – Are relevant, selfless (non-promotional) news, blogs, articles that you can share and will be valuable to your audience. Within these 12-20, you CAN include 1-2 per day that are specifically about you, what you do, your blog, etc. Be careful on the frequency of posts that “pitch” what you do.
Personal Posts – Are posts that don’t include links and make you human to your followers. Things like the weather, checkins, funny comments or pictures. Telling content that makes you approachable and spark conversation and relationship building with YOU as an individual, not your company, product or service.
RT’s/Comments – Since we know everything starts with content which leads to conversation, you need to follow this principle as well. Take time reviewing your news feed to find content from your followers that is valuable and share it. Comment on the human or content posts from your audience. This will build relationships, show that you value them and lead to other conversations and opportunities.
*note – ALWAYS respond to mentions and Retweets from your followers. Thank them and look for opportunities to start conversations.
**note – NEVER post a bunch of content at the same time or seconds/minutes apart. Spread your content posting across the day in intervals that show consistency. Nobody likes a broadcaster!
When Should I Post on My Facebook Fanpage
I’ve been asked many times “how often should I post on my Facebook fan page?” I just wanted to share some tips to remember when posting to your page.
Here are some points to keep in mind while running a fan page:
1. For most fanpages, there is a direct correlation between frequency of posts and number of fans. Frequency is king, but there is a fine balance – you dont want to overwhelm your fans.
2. If you are just starting out with your fanpage, a minimum of one status update is suggested and it can then be increased to several times a day (mixing up the type of posts) if you are getting good response from your fans.
3. Daily posting should yield daily comments and engagements. You will find the right rythm with your fans. Better to start with once a day than several times a day and have you wall filled with only your own posts.
4. Also keep in mind “high traffic windows”. Depending on your time zone and the time zome of the majority of your fans, you should post at the times, you fans are there on Facebook.
5. Post during peak hours.
Finally, look at your Facebook Insights to determine when your best updates (in terms of Total Views) were posted.
If you can’t find any patterns or clues, then you can’t go wrong with the following schedule:
Early Morning (7am – 9am)
End of Work (5pm – 7pm)
Late Night (11pm – 1am)
I’ve been testing out Recommend.ly and what they do is help you make every fan count. They try to help you by telling you how many updates, how many comments you received, and likes. Try it out and let me know what you think.
How to Use Social Media Giveaways to Grow Your Business
Promotions have been a staple in the marketing toolbox for ages. They help grow awareness and create excitement around your brand. But social promotions are even better. It’s the best way to have your message spread authentically (and cheaply). Here’s how you can use social promotions to grow your business.
Determine Your Goal
Before you even start, you need to think about your social media goals. Every status update, and campaign idea needs to support your goals. Otherwise you’ll get terrible results. When running a social promotion, you have to make an important choice.
Do you want to grow awareness, or increase engagement?
If you want to build brand awareness, then run a sweepstakes or giveaway. You should make it as easy as possible for people to enter. If you want to increase engagement of your audience, then hold a contest where people have to take an action and join the discussion. In the beginning you might want to focus heavily on building awareness. But you’ll also have to focus on engagement if you want to get the most out of social media.
Product Giveaway
The easiest, least expensive way to run a promotion is to give away your own products and services. Managing a promotion takes a lot of work, but the actual cash-out-of-pocket doesn’t have to be a lot. Prizes usually push the cost up dramatically. So try creating your own packages by bundling a few products or services that you can give away. Just make sure it’s valuable, and it’s something you know your audience will love.
Partner with Others
The best way to get more customers is through referrals and recommendations from others. Look for other companies who complement your business, and who have similar customers. This works well when you partner with larger companies who may be more established and have more fans. They’ll do the selling to their audience, and you’ll quickly reap the rewards. You can also combine your partner’s products and services to create even better packages. For example, if you’re a restaurant, you could partner with a local hotel and spa for an unforgettable “weekend escape”.
Include Bloggers
Social media is the new PR. And bloggers are the new journalists you want to reach online. If they have the right audience, then it doesn’t matter how big it is. Reaching these passionate, niche markets is key to online marketing. And bloggers are your gateway to growing traffic. Give them free samples or an exlcusive “sneak peak”. If you get them involved early, then they’ll do the selling for you.
Add a Viral Component
Regular promotions work well. But viral ones are even better.
The difference?
Promotions with a viral element have people involve their friends or social graph. The best example is to have people vote, and the winner will have the most votes or Likes at the end of the competition. You’ll get friends-of-friends involved, and it will dramatically increase your reach to new people. This viral growth is the biggest advantage of online social promotions. And it helps you get more leads without investing more money.
Summary
Promotions are still a great marketing tactic. And they’re also one of the most cost effective. Social promotions are an essential tool to consistently grow your audience and create more engagement in your community. Without growth and engagement, your progress will plateau. And you won’t actually accomplish any of your goals.
The Oprah Effect in Social Media
Oprah has one of the biggest audiences of any TV personality.
And it’s not by accident.
She’s worked tirelessly for years on building a platform for her engaged followers. Some of her methods have been analyzed through a marketing lens in Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents.
But on her new show, Lifeclass, she’s taken her social media use to the next level.
And her lessons can provide brands and businesses of all shapes and sizes, new insights into using social media to build their businesses.
Here’s how Oprah is taking advantage, and how you can do the same.
Social Media is Deeply Integrated
Social media isn’t some shiny new tactic that’s isolated from the rest of her brand.
In fact, it’s integrated deeply into everything she does. Her new show encourages interaction with several different platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and even live-streaming video with Skype.
She also uses these new tools to take advantage of real-time information.
For example, Oprah encourages viewers at home and in the audience to live tweet responses to the topics mentioned on the show and then discusses them in real-time with her guests.
David Meerman Scott has written extensively about the importance of real-time marketing. But one of his biggest takeaway’s is this, “Social media are tools. Real time is a mindset.”
To get to that point, businesses need to embrace social media as a real extension of their brand and begin incorporating it appropriately.
You can’t have a list of “pre-approved” social media responses from legal, and expect an engaged following. And you can’t hire a cheap blog writer and expect exceptional content.
If you’re going in, then you need to go all-in to succeed.
She Uses Incentives to Keep People Engaged
Human nature says that most people won’t go out of their way to do anything if it doesn’t benefit them. Harsh, but true.
So incentivizing people is one of the best ways to keep people engaged. You can appeal to their self-interest by providing some value, and you can get their cooperation at the same time.
One of the most common examples of an incentive are coupons or special discounts. But those don’t work for all brands. Especially media companies like Oprah’s. But each company should have their own unique offer that would appeal to their target audience.
Oprah’s Lifeclass also incorporates Facebook polls into the show and offers real-time results. Those viewers tuning in online are awarded with a behind-the-scenes look at what happens during commercial breaks. In essence, the camera never stops rolling, and only those watching online are privy to that footage. Fans can also post comments on the site and interact with others watching the show.
Oprah doesn’t beg users – she rewards them. She knows exactly what her users want, and she delivers.
Increasing engagement is the key to social media. Because it doesn’t matter how many Facebook fans she has. Facebook’s EdgeRank won’t let her reach all of them. If she wants a social media presence that is an asset to her brand and grows organically, then she needs to follow the Facebook Formula.
When you get people excited and engaged, then you’ll strengthen these existing relationships and experience viral growth in the process.
She Gets Bloggers Involved
Mass media advertising and PR doesn’t work well anymore because there’s too many options to divert your attention.
That’s why social media is the new PR for most companies outside of the Fortune 500.
And blogs are essential to this strategy. Even though their audiences may be smaller, they’re more passionate and targeted, so you’re going to get a better return on your investment.
But you first have to get bloggers on your side. You have to get them to care about you, and willing to recommend or share you with their audience.
Although Oprah’s Lifeclass doesn’t have too much formal marketing, it relies mostly on word-of-mouth marketing. It invites a traveling blogger corp. to its live shows to tweet during each episode and feature behind-the-scenes commentary.
Most people think blogger outreach is spamming the same cold-email pitch to 100 bloggers, asking for a link or a mention. It’s not.
True blogger outreach is getting to know the person and developing a friendly relationship that will last for years, not minutes.
Besides being nice, you’ll also gain access to a tremendous amount of online media attention that will help you reach new people, and strengthen ties with existing ones.
She Uses Her Own Twitter Account
Most businesses stick an intern on Twitter or outsource it to the cheapest agency.
But that’s a huge mistake.
Every business owner should have their own Twitter account. Because they’ll get access to the latest breaking news, gain competitive intelligence, and get real feedback from customers.
But that’s not all.
Apart from the show, Oprah is extremely active on social media, especially Twitter. “Every tweet she sends is hers — the marketing team isn’t allowed to go anywhere near her Twitter account,” says the spokesperson.
Twitter is an amazing platform because it allows you to interact with anyone. That opens up huge doors for celebrities, brands and companies to actually have candid, authentic conversations with people.
Another master of audience building, Howard Stern, made headlines on New Year’s Eve by using Twitter to get in touch with his fans and actually calling them up.
Why go to all this effort?
Because when people feel more connected to you on a personal level, then they’re going to stick around a lot longer and be loyal to you.
Conclusion
Oprah is a master at relationships and cultivating a passionate audience.
None of that has anything to do with online tactics or strategies.
She’s just taking advantage of these new tools and techniques and leveraging them to build her business.
That’s how social media benefits businesses. It let’s you reach new customers for far less than most other marketing tactics, and keeps them loyal for much, much longer.
When the cost of customer acquisition falls, and and the lifetime value of a customer increases, then your profit goes through the roof.
And in the process, people actually like you. That’s something every business can aspire to.
11 Things to Tweet About – Part II
Here are more helpful tips on what to share and tweet about on Twitter.
1. Tweet about any sales announcements you might have.
2. Share info on job openings: inform others of open positions.
3. Ask for followers for feedback: Invite people to share their experiences with your brand.
4. Participate in the relevant hashtags, and get more visibility.
5. Set up and announce tweet chats based on brand-related hashtags.
6. Post the latest updates from your blog, FB, along with the link.
7. Direct people to other social media channels you own by tweeting about them.
8. Search on your brand name and respond to tweets that are about you.
9. Create Twitter lists of industry-relevant analysts, well-wishers or customers, and announce the lists publically. This sends a positive message to the mentioned people.
10. Participate in trending topics and viral hashtags to rope in some attention. Ensure your opinion are related to your brand somehow.
11. Tweet-greet your followers daily. Saying small things like “good morning,” or asking about them goes a long way in forging ties.
Do you have any you would like to add?
10 Things to Tweet About – Part I
Most professionals get lost in the twitter-sphere after a few days into Twitter. Once you’ve had enough of following influential people and saying “Hi and Thank you for following”, there seems hardly anything worth doing. If you are facing a similar Twitter-crisis, relax, these tips are especially for you. Just use a little bit of imagination and you can transform your Twitter-space almost magically.
Here are some tips to tweet when you run out of things to tweet:
1. Offer teaser previews of offerings you are working on.
2. Make new announcements about what’s going on with your company.
3. Share relevant and interesting news from the industry.
4. Reach out and ask for suggestions: people love to help someone out.
5. Share information on events you are holding or conferences you’re attending.
6. Show your humor side: share jokes.
7. Share quotes and daily wisdom, or just about anything else.
8. Helping people find opportunities and solve problems.
9. Tweet about unexpected developments: “Are you having problems with Gmail today”?
10. Tweet about your industry news.
What are your thoughts?
Do You Like the New Look of Google+
Are you apart of my “circle”? Circle me!
If you haven’t noticed Google has announced that Google+, its social network, is getting a major design overhaul with a new user interface to make things easier to share. If you have here are two videos that will show you how to utilize the new features.
The new features and new look is still to be rolled out to the 170m Google+ users, however that hasn’t stopped Google detailing what you can expect to see when the update does land in your Google+.
“One of the first things you’ll notice is a new way to get around the stream. Instead of static icons at the top, there’s a dynamic ribbon of applications on the left.”
According to Google: “This approach comes with lots of perks” – such as the ability to drag apps up or down to create the order you want, the ability to hover over certain apps to reveal a set of quick actions and the ability to show or hide apps if you don’t want them.
As with Facebook, Google is seeing that people like sharing photos so it is doing its best – without buying companies like Instagram for $1bn – to make photo sharing easier and more enjoyable.
You now get full-bleed photos and videos, a stream of conversation “cards” that make it easier to scan and join discussions, and an activity drawer that highlights the community around your content.
Google+ Hangouts also gets a stronger focus in the new design and now there is now a dedicated Hangouts page.
Checkout how Google+ Hangouts also gets a stronger focus in the new design and now there is now a dedicated Hangouts page.
Finally, if you are bored with your life you can see what others are chirping about with a new “Explore page” that shows what’s interesting and trending across the network. How do you like the changes?
Follow Pocketlint
