Real Web Marketing Blog

Auto Tweets

by John Eberhard

I’ve been using the Tweet Adder software for some time now to add more followers for my own Twitter account and those of a number of my clients. It has an “auto tweet” function that allows you to set up messages that you want to go out to your Twitter followers on an automated basis.

Tweet Adder also allows you to set up an automated email message that goes out to people saying “Hey thanks for following me” when they follow you. I think that’s one of the worst cases of wasted bits and bytes in the history of computing so I’m not talking about that.

The feature I’m talking about allows you to set up automated messages to go out to all your Twitter followers. You can set up as many as you want, and then determine how many of them will go out per day.

I had never used this feature until a friend told me he was doing it and it was causing significant traffic to his web site. So I decided to give it a try, and I’ve been running automated tweets for my own account and five other accounts, for a couple of weeks. And I see after checking Google Analytics that it is starting to generate traffic.

On one of the accounts I’ve got around 40 auto tweets set up, and then it is set so that 20 of them show per day. So that way they cycle through every other day, not the same ones every day. You can also set the time between the messages so I set that at 15 minutes.

The question some people may ask is “Doesn’t that make it look like those messages are automated? Can’t people tell it is a bot doing it?” Well yeah, that’s possible. But I doubt that most people would be on Twitter long enough or frequently enough to notice that. Especially if you keep adding more messages over time so there is less frequent repetition of the messages.

So the next question would be, “What type of messages should I send out?” Always the helpful soul, I have come up with a list of the types of things you should send out.

1. Link to Articles: If you have a blog or information articles on your web site, then just write out the title of the article in quotes, then a link to the article. For the link use a URL shortener like www.goo.gl, because you only get 140 characters on Twitter. If you have lots of articles you have written, do one auto tweet for each.

2. Link to Free Reports or White Papers: If you have any free reports or white papers that you are offering, then say something like “Download my free white paper “Marketing with Social Media” http://goo.gl/Vqx6N”.

3. Links to Your Email Newsletter Signup: If you offer a free email newsletter, promote it via Twitter, with a little blurb explaining what the newsletter is about and a link to the signup page. Remember, only 140 characters.

4. Links to Videos: If you have some videos about your company on YouTube, write a short blurb about the video and include a link to it.

5. Products or Services: Do an auto tweet for each of your products or services. Write a short explanatory blurb about the product or service, then include a link to the page on your web site that is about that.

6. Testimonials: Do an auto tweet linking to your testimonials page.

7. Facebook: Ask your Twitter followers to be your Facebook friend or to like your fan page and include a link to your Facebook profile or fan page.

8. LinkedIn: Ask people to connect to you on LinkedIn.

9. Events: if you’re holding some special event like a seminar or webinar or something like that, do an auto tweet, but make sure to take it out of your list after the event is over.

That’s not meant to be a complete list, but it can definitely get you going. Then let the traffic begin. Good luck with your social media marketing.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Social Media Marketing Summary

by John Eberhard

I have written several articles recently on social media marketing and this article will summarize the most vital points from those articles.

Adding Friends

Before I summarize the past articles, here is a bit of new. If you want to use social media sites to market your business, you have to have a lot of friends (Facebook), followers (Twitter), and connections (LinkedIn). Because if you want to put out messages promoting your business on social media, you need to have those messages seen by a lot of people, otherwise it won’t do any good.

So you have to develop a strategy of adding friends/followers/connections on a regular basis. It works best to do this a little bit every day, or at least 4-5 days per week, rather than trying to do a whole lot at once. The reason for this is that each of the sites has a concept of what they consider an acceptable level of friending activity, and if you exceed that in a short period of time, they will either shut down your account temporarily or permanently.

Facebook allows a max of 5,000 friends, but there is no limit to the number of fans for a fan page. I use software to add followers for Twitter and have gotten my own account up to near 10,000 and two other accounts over 2,000 followers.

Social Media Outflow Strategy

What type of communications should you put out in your own status updates, i.e. the communications that go out to all your social media connections?

You should set up an account on www.Ping.fm and connect up all your social media accounts to it. That way when you post something on Ping.fm, it goes out to all your social media accounts.

But back to what you should say. Here are some tips.

1. I have had a successful strategy with regard to my business, whereby I post messages saying what I am working on at the time, such as “I am setting up a new Google AdWords account for a client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a veterinarian,” or “I am adding more Twitter followers for a client.” What this does is create good “top of mind awareness.” That’s where when someone thinks of an Internet marketing consultant, I’m one of the guys they think of.

2. Every time you post new content on your blog, you should put out a status update saying “See my new blog post,” then the name of your article, then a link to it. Since the number of characters you get on Twitter (and Ping.fm) is only 140, it makes sense to use a URL shortener for the address of the article, such as www.goo.gl.

3. If your company puts up a new video on YouTube, post an update about it with a link to the video.

4. If you publish a press release on your web site or blog, post an update about this with a link to it.

5. I have one client where I put together client testimonials for him and post them on his web site. Every time one of these goes up, I post a status update about it to his social media accounts.

6. If your company releases any type of special report or white paper related to a topic within your industry, post a link to it.

7. You can post a link to some interesting article or video you found relating to your industry.

8. Whenever you have an event coming up, like a seminar, class, speech, webinar, or appearance at a trade show, post something announcing it.

9. If you are having a sale or special, you should definitely post about it, possibly several times.

10. Avoid making every single status update a pitch for your business. While you should post about all your seminars, classes, speeches, webinars, or trade show appearances, if all you ever post are pitches for your promotional actions, it could cause people to tune you out or even hide your posts or unfriend you. I think it is helpful to throw in some personal stuff, like a trip you’re taking, or a sports event or concert you attended.

It is definitely a good idea to post status updates to your social media accounts frequently. It all comes under the heading of creating top of mind awareness. Using these tips you can increase your posting frequency.

Social Media Engagement

There is another important point that is vital in effectively using social media sites to market. That is your amount of engagement with others on social media sites. By engagement in this case I mean “interacting back and forth with people on the social media sites.”

The idea is that you are not just outflowing information or messages to your friends, followers or connections. You should be viewing what other people are doing or saying and interacting with them about it.

I was talking to a friend about this recently and I could tell he thought it would be a daunting task, i.e. that it would take him too much time. But I think it is important if you want to get much benefit from social media sites, and I don’t think it has to take a lot of time. Here are some examples:

1. On Facebook, click on “Home,” then at the top click on “Most Recent.” This brings up a feed of things that your Facebook friends have posted, including short blurbs about what they are doing, comments on things, links to articles elsewhere on the web, pictures they have uploaded, or links to videos on YouTube. Quickly scroll through this feed to look for things that interest you. If someone has posted a blurb or comment that you agree with, click the “Like” button underneath that post. Or post a short comment on it yourself.

2. On Facebook, in the upper right area of the page is a list of your Facebook friends for whom today is their birthday. Review this list and for anyone who is a real life friend, click through to their page and where it says “Write something,” write a quick “Happy birthday Joe” message.

3. On Facebook there are groups or fan pages you can find about areas of interest or about your industry. Click “like” on some of these groups and follow or join in the discussions that appear on their fan pages.

4. Facebook has its own email system. Read any Facebook email you get and reply to it.

5. On Twitter, you can spend a few minutes following the posts of other people that you are following, then “re-tweet” the ones you like (that means to send that particular post again out to all of your followers).

6. Set up folders in your email program and set up mail rules that will dump all Facebook emails into a folder for Facebook and all Twitter emails into a folder for Twitter. That way they do not clutter up your main inbox and you can handle those emails when you have time.

7. On Twitter, you will receive emails that say “Direct message from Joe Jones.” Unfortunately a lot of these will be automatically generated messages that others send out whenever someone follows them, most saying “Thanks for following me. Look forward to reading your messages.” The auto direct message is an unfortunate thing you have to put up with. But be on the lookout for any direct messages from others who are actually communicating to you. Reply to them.

8. One thing you can do on Twitter is do a search for your company name or brand, and see what people are saying about you. Then respond to them or re-tweet their stuff if it is positive. If it’s negative, it gives you a chance to monitor any problems and respond to them.

The web, and especially social media sites, are all about interaction, a conversation, back and forth. In the days before the web and social media, most companies were used to putting out communications that their public or consumers would receive. The public could write them a letter but most people never did that.

Measuring Your Success

I was recently thinking about how you should measure your success with social media. I found an excellent article on this called “3 Key Metrics To Measure Social Media Success” by Clay McDaniel on SearchEngineWatch.com. I’ll explain and simplify what he is saying, plus add some additional ways of my own to measure social media success. Here are McDaniel’s 3 key metrics:

1. Total Online Community Size: Add up your total Facebook fans of your fan page and/or friends for your profile, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, YouTube channel subscribers, and blog unique users.

In my opinion this is one of the most important metrics in terms of how well you are doing, because it gives the total number of people you can reach with your social media communications.

2. Monthly Referred Traffic to Site: Go into Google Analytics and see how many total people came to your site, referred from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

If you are posting status updates on your social media accounts that link back to your site or mention things you are doing, this should be generating traffic, i.e. people clicking on the link and coming to your site.

3. Social Monthly Impressions: This is the number of times someone mentions your company or brand on social media sites. You can set up a Google Alert to measure this.

Here are some additional ways of my own to measure what is going on with social media:

4. Status Updates Out Monthly: This is a total of how many times you sent out a business related status update to all your social media accounts. I think this should be tracked because it is one of the main things you are doing that will affect how people respond.

5. Blog Posts Monthly: This is the number of posts you are putting out on your blog or blogs. As mentioned in earlier articles the ideal frequency of this is once a week or more.

Good luck with your social media marketing.

 

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Top Social Media Sites

By John Eberhard

In the online world things seem to change, faster than fashion, faster than the weather, faster that yesterday’s clothes. What was the greatest thing last year could be completely washed up this year.

So it is with social media. In this article I will list out some of the current top social media sites. Except for the first couple, I am not claiming to rank these sites.

1. Facebook has really jumped into first place and doesn’t look like it will be leaving that spot anytime soon. I took a liking to this site from the beginning and have used it to market my business and make money. You start up a personal profile, can put up a fan page for your business (which has been enhanced in the last year), and can put up a pay per click ad campaign. If you have a fan page, you can now post a button on your regular web site for people to “like” the fan page. Of course the key with Facebook, either when marketing from your personal profile or from a fan page, is to have lots of friends (personal profile) or fans (fan page). You can post a status update with text, pictures or videos, and you can comment on other people’s posts, thus starting threads.

2. Twitter popularized the concept of “micro-blogging,” i.e. posting status updates with a max of 140 characters. You follow people, and others will follow you to see what you have to say. You can post what you’re doing with your business, and post links to your articles or videos or offers. It pays to use a URL shortener like www.goo.gl for any web addresses you include in your post, since the number of characters is so short. In terms of following people, you can target people who have certain keywords or phrases in their bio or in their “tweets.” You can also follow people that follow or are followed by another specific user.

3. LinkedIn is a popular business networking site. Your profile contains data on where you work now and where you’ve worked in the past, and you can connect to other people who have worked where you work or have worked in the past, or who have a lot of connections in common with you, or who are in your industry. You can post status updates just like Facebook or Twitter.

4. Ping.fm is a social media syndication site, which means that you can start up an account on it and then hook up all your other social media sites to it. It gives you a field to write your status updates in, with a limit of 140 characters just like Twitter. Then when you post something on Ping.fm, if you’ve hooked it up right, that post will go out to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other accounts. I like the idea of being able to send messages out to thousands of people at once, so I like this site.

5. MySpace. My how the mighty have fallen. MySpace used to be the top social media site a couple years ago, but has really dropped off. I personally think it is because of the idiotic way they let people customize their profile pages, so that every page you go to, you have to figure out where everything is. While I’m all in favor of originality, many people took it too far, some putting background images behind their page so you could not even read the text. I heard MySpace just got sold this week for $35 million, most of it in stock. That’s a pittance in this field. And I recently was working on adding friends to a client’s MySpace account, and had to struggle to get 50 in a month, because apparently hardly anyone goes on it anymore.

6. Wordpress.com is a free blogging site, where you can sign up and then put up a free blog on the topic of your choice. There are several free blogging sites but I personally like Wordpress.com the best because it is built on the Wordpress architecture, which gives you a lot of features and options. It also has a feature built in to send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines, whenever you post anything.

I’ll explain something about Wordpress that many people don’t understand. Wordpress is a blogging system. You can download files from Wordpress.org, and install them on your hosting account and customize your blog in whatever way you want. Also most hosting companies will help you install Wordpress on your site so you don’t have to do the manual install which despite what Wordpress says, takes 30-45 minutes. Installing Wordpress on your site is free, and you can have your blog have whatever web address you want.

Wordpress.com on the other hand, is a free blogging site, and you start an account and your blog is then hosted on their site, and will have “Wordpress” in the URL (http://yourblogname.wordpress.com).

7. Blogger.com is perhaps the #2 free blogging site. You can start an account and put up a blog of your choice. They have a lot of users and are owned by Google, but I find them a lot harder to customize your page.

8. Posterous.com is another free blogging site. They have one very special feature, which is once you set up an account on Posterous, you can hook up all your other blogs to it. Then you post something on Posterous, and it goes out to all your other blogs automatically. Another great time saver.

9. Blog.com is another free blogging site. Like Wordpress.com, they use the Wordpress architecture which makes it easier to customize and gives you lots of features.

10. Squidoo is a fairly high traffic site where you can put up a page (called a “lens”) about some specific topic. This page can have an article, pictures, videos, and links to your blog or blogs. Your article can contain text links (called “anchor text”) which are the best type of links to have to your site. Squidoo seems to understand that people may want to use their site to market products or services, and they don’t seem to think that’s a crime or anything.

11. HubPages is another site similar to Squidoo, where you can put up a page and include an article, pictures, videos, etc. The only problem is that Hubpages does seem to think it’s a crime to market anything using their site, so they limit you to only one link per page, and will sometimes disapprove your article if they determine it is not completely unique, i.e. if the same article is posted anywhere else. So according to them, you’re supposed to write an article and put it up on their site and not anywhere else, and do it out of the philanthropy and goodness of your heart, with no desire to ever (gasp) make money or anything evil like that. Guess you can tell what I think of them.

12. Google Knol is a new site sort of similar to Squidoo and HubPages, where you can post articles. You can include pictures and links to your heart’s content, and since it is owned by Google my guess is it gives pretty good link juice.

Good luck with social media marketing.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Measuring Success with Social Media

by John Eberhard

I have started doing a lot of social media marketing work for clients where I add friends, followers and connections to their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. I was adding friends for them on MySpace too but have recently discovered that hardly anyone is using MySpace anymore, so I am dropping that from the mix.

All this got me thinking about how you should measure your success with social media. I found an excellent article on this called “3 Key Metrics To Measure Social Media Success” by Clay McDaniel on SearchEngineWatch.com. I’ll explain and simplify what he is saying, plus add some additional ways of my own to measure social media success. Here are McDaniel’s 3 key metrics:

1. Total Online Community Size: Add up your total Facebook fans of your fan page and/or friends for your profile, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, YouTube channel subscribers, and blog unique users.

In my opinion this is one of the most important metrics in terms of how well you are doing, because it gives the total number of people you can reach with your social media communications. This is also something you should be working on regularly to increase these numbers.

2. Monthly Referred Traffic to Site: Go into Google Analytics and see how many total people came to your site, referred from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

If you are posting status updates on your social media accounts that link back to your site or mention things you are doing, this should be generating traffic, i.e. people clicking on the link and coming to your site.

3. Social Monthly Impressions: This is the number of times someone mentions your company or brand on social media sites. You can set up a Google Alert to measure this.

I recently found that posting press releases on two specific online PR sites caused over 150 people to tweet the title of my press release and link to it from their Twitter accounts. I found this out by searching for my company name on Twitter.

Here are some additional ways of my own to measure what is going on with social media:

4. Status Updates Out Monthly: This is a total of how many times you sent out a business related status update to all your social media accounts. This is of course what you are doing rather than how people are responding to you. But I think this should be tracked because it is one of the main things you are doing that will affect how people respond. See my article from last week on what you should put out.

5. Blog Posts Monthly: This is the number of posts you are putting out on your blog or blogs. As mentioned in earlier articles the ideal frequency of this is once a week or more.

Good luck with your social media marketing.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Your Social Media Outflow Strategy

by John Eberhard

Last week I talked about how you should engage with your friends, followers and connections on social media, and respond to their communications.

But what type of communications should you put out in your own status updates, i.e. the communications that go out to all your social media connections?

Well first of all I have recommended in the past that you set up an account on www.Ping.fm and connect up all your social media accounts to it. That way when you post something on Ping.fm, it goes out to all your social media accounts and you don’t have to log into a bunch of accounts to send your message. That saves a lot of time.

But back to what you should say. Your strategy of course will have to work with your personality and what you feel comfortable saying in your social media marketing. But here are some tips.

1. I have had a successful strategy with regard to my business, whereby I post messages saying what I am working on at the time, such as “I am setting up a new Google AdWords account for a client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a veterinarian,” or “I am adding more Twitter followers for a client.” I was telling a friend about this recently and his reaction was “Isn’t that really boring?” I suppose you could say that it is. But what it does do is create good “top of mind awareness.” That’s where when someone thinks of an Internet marketing consultant, I’m one of the guys they think of. I have gotten substantial business from social media using this strategy. You may be able to use this strategy to create top of mind awareness for your company.

2. Every time you post new content on your blog, you should put out a status update saying “See my new blog post,” then the name of your article, then a link to it. Since the number of characters you get on Twitter (and Ping.fm) is only 140, it makes sense to use a URL shortener for the address of the article, such as www.goo.gl.

3. If your company puts up a new video on YouTube, post an update about it with a link to the video.

4. If you publish a press release on your web site or blog, post an update about this with a link to it.

5. I have one client where I put together client testimonials for him and post them on his web site. Every time one of these goes up, I post a status update about it to his social media accounts.

6. If your company releases any type of special report or white paper related to a topic within your industry, post a link to it. Usually these are offered in such a way that the person has to give you his name and email to get the report, as a method of lead generation. So post a link to the signup page.

7. You can post a link to some interesting article or video you found relating to your industry.

8. Whenever you have an event coming up, like a seminar, class, speech, webinar, or appearance at a trade show, post something announcing it.

9. If you are having a sale or special, you should definitely post about it, possibly several times.

10. Avoid making every single status update a pitch for your business. While you should post about all your seminars, classes, speeches, webinars, or trade show appearances, if all you ever post are pitches for your promotional actions, it could cause people to tune you out or even hide your posts or unfriend you. I think it is helpful to throw in some personal stuff, like a trip you’re taking, or a sports event or concert you attended.

It is definitely a good idea to post status updates to your social media accounts frequently. It all comes under the heading of creating top of mind awareness. Using these tips you can increase your posting frequency.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Social Media Engagement

by John Eberhard

In past articles I’ve talked about the necessity of getting lots of friends, followers and connections on social media sites, if you want to use them effectively for marketing purposes.

But there is another important point that is vital in effectively using social media sites to market. That is your amount of engagement with others on social media sites. By engagement in this case I mean “interacting back and forth with people on the social media sites.”

The idea is that you are not just outflowing information or messages to your friends, followers or connections on sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. You should be viewing what other people are doing or saying and interacting with them about it.

I was talking to a friend about this recently and I could tell he thought it would be a daunting task, i.e. that it would take him too much time. But I think it is important if you want to get much benefit from social media sites, and I don’t think it has to take a lot of time. Here are some examples:

1. On Facebook, click on “Home,” then at the top click on “Most Recent.” This brings up a feed of things that your Facebook friends have posted, including short blurbs about what they are doing, comments on things, links to articles elsewhere on the web, pictures they have uploaded, or links to videos on YouTube. Quickly scroll through this feed to look for things that interest you. If someone has posted a blurb or comment that you agree with, click the “Like” button underneath that post. Or post a short comment on it yourself. Similarly if someone has posted a link to an article or video that you like or agree with, click the “Like” button or post your own comment. It is easy to spend excessive time on this but you should discipline yourself and make it take no more than 5 minutes a day. When you click the “Like” button or post a comment on someone else’s content, they receive an email. It shows them that you give a hoot about them and it’s not all about you.

2. On Facebook, in the upper right area of the page is a list of your Facebook friends for whom today is their birthday. Review this list and for anyone who is a real life friend, click through to their page and where it says “Write something,” write a quick “Happy birthday Joe” message.

3. On Facebook there are groups or fan pages you can find about areas of interest or about your industry. Click “like” on some of these groups and follow or join in the discussions that appear on their fan pages.

4. Facebook has its own email system. Read any Facebook email you get and reply to it.

5. On Twitter, you can spend a few minutes following the posts of other people that you are following, then “re-tweet” the ones you like (that means to send that particular post again out to all of your followers). Or you can send them a direct message via Twitter.

6. Set up folders in your email program and set up mail rules that will dump all Facebook emails into a folder for Facebook and all Twitter emails into a folder for Twitter. That way they do not clutter up your main inbox and you can handle those emails when you have time.

7. On Twitter, you will receive emails that say “Direct message from Joe Jones.” Unfortunately a lot of these will be automatically generated messages that others send out whenever someone follows them, most saying “Thanks for following me. Look forward to reading your messages.” Some will include a link to something they are pitching. I think whoever invented the auto direct messages on Twitter should have a special seat reserved for them in a very hot place, next to that guy who invented that sticky tape along the top of a CD jewel case. The auto direct message is an unfortunate thing you have to put up with. But be on the lookout for any direct messages from others who are actually communicating to you. Reply to them.

8. One thing you can do on Twitter is do a search for your company name or brand, and see what people are saying about you. Then respond to them or re-tweet their stuff if it is positive. If it’s negative, it gives you a chance to monitor any problems and respond to them.

The web, and especially social media sites, are all about interaction, a conversation, back and forth. In the days before the web and social media, most companies were used to putting out communications that their public or consumers would receive. The public could write them a letter but most people never did that.

Today with social media it is much easier for people to write back to a company, or to comment about it. It’s vital, especially as your company expands, to be aware of what people are saying and to respond and be engaged in conversation.

But even beyond managing your public relations, it is best to engage with others on social media sites. By showing interest in your online friends and what they are saying and in responding to their communications, it ensures they will show more interest in you.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Facebook Fan Pages and New Landing Pages

by John Eberhard

Facebook has initiated some changes with fan pages, that make them more interesting and easier to use to accomplish social media marketing of your product or service.

The most interesting thing is that you can set up a separate landing page that a person will come to initially, before they have clicked “like” and become one of your fans. This uses new technology from Facebook called Facebook Markup Language, or FBML.

This initial landing page can have a large graphic in the middle of it that you or a designer can create, which is a major change from the way Facebook used to do it. You can also make parts of the graphic link to various things, such as your main web site or blog.

It used to be that whoever came to your Facebook fan page came to a “wall” which showed a feed of activity for the fan page, including things you sent out and things that fans posted.

Now you can select what people will see when they come to your fan page, before they click “like,” and after they click it. Default options include your wall, info (which shows basic text information and web site links), and photos. But using FBML, you can now make a new welcome screen that people will see before they click “like,” and you can put whatever you want there.

Here are two examples I made recently, one for RealWebMarketing.net, and one for Straight Talk Wealth Radio. Note that if you have already “liked” either of these Facebook fan pages you won’t see the initial landing page. You would have to log out of Facebook to see them. Then once you click “like” you will see something different, in both of these cases the “wall,” which shows the feed of recent activity such as things the fan page owner has posted.

Using FBML you can also create other pages, with large graphics again, pitching products you are selling or free offers you are giving away. These new pages will show up in the side or top menu. Here’s an example of one I made for RealWebMarketing.net, offering my free white papers and my book. If you give it some thought there are a wide array of possibilities for what you can do with this.

Note that one strategy you could choose would be to have the sole message of your initial fan page landing page be to push the person to click “like,” and offer them things they will get if they do so. For instance, they will get access to a free report you’ve created, if they click “like.” Then you could put access to that free report on one of the other FBML pages. So in this way you are offering an incentive for them to become one of your fans.

Getting lots of fans for your fan page, besides being an ego stroker, allows you to send them messages easily, market to them and keep in touch with them.

I’ll discuss more on strategies for getting lots of fans for your Facebook fan page in a future article.

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Twitter Marketing Strategy

by John Eberhard

In order to effectively accomplish Twitter marketing, you have to have a lot of followers. Then you should post messages or “tweets” (I hate that word) regularly to let people know what you are doing with your business. So how do you get lots of followers?

I use a software program called Tweet Adder to accomplish this. My own personal Twitter account now has 8,103 followers currently, and I am managing several other client accounts, several of which are close to 2,000.

The basic strategy for adding lots of followers on Twitter is to follow other people, a certain percentage of whom will follow you back. Then, using the software, you identify those who didn’t follow you after several days, and “unfollow” them. Then start again by following more people. At the same time, you start putting out messages (tweets) regularly, so that other people will see your activity and follow you.

Targeting

Tweet Adder allows you to identify people who are most likely to be your prospects, and add them to a queue to be followed by you. You can search for people based on geographical location, by certain words in their bio, and by certain words in their tweets.

Let’s say you have a veterinary practice in Indianapolis. You would target people within a certain mile radius of the city, and also people who mentioned something about pets, dogs, cats, etc., in their bio or in their tweets.

Or let’s say you make software for Mac computers. You would search for anyone who mentioned “Mac” in their bios or in their tweets.

There are a variety of ways you could approach this, but the basic idea is that you can use these tools to zero in and find people who would be your most likely prospects.

Following

Once you have located people who are likely prospects and have them in a queue, you start following them, several hundred per day. Twitter has some sort of system to determine what they think is your limit of people that you can follow per day or per every couple days. They are pretty tight lipped about how they figure out this limit, but from my observation it is between 100 and 500 per day, and apparently it is higher depending on how many followers you have.

You don’t have to worry about hitting this limit because they will just tell you that you’ve reached the limit. There is no penalty or threatening email or anything.

Un-Following

I have Tweet Adder set up so that it will identify people who have not followed you back within 3 days. Then you can tell it to un-follow those people. The idea is that you are following these people in order to get them to follow you back, so if they don’t, you remove them. You can also create a “white list” of people that you want to follow regardless of whether they follow you or not, such as celebrities, big media outlets, etc.

Your Bio

Make sure your bio is really clear and brief as to what you do or what your business is. That is so that people who scrutinize the bio to see if they want to follow you back, can see easily who you are and what you do. Don’t make it cryptic or hard to understand.

Tweeting

If you are following people aggressively, a certain percentage will follow you back. It helps with this if you are putting out tweets regularly, as some people will look at what you are saying on Twitter before following you back. But this also helps in another way.

Let’s say you are regularly putting out tweets about what you are doing with your business, and those tweets contain certain popular keywords related to your business. People will search on Twitter for certain keywords, see who is writing tweets that contain those keywords, and follow them. I discovered this early on with my own account, where I would write tweets containing phrases like “pay per click advertising,” or “web design,” or “search engine optimization.” After one of those I’d get a bunch of people following me.

As a general tweeting strategy, I have found it works well to simply write tweets that talk about what you are doing with your business. For me this is “I just signed up a new pay per click ad client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a tree nursery in WA,” or “I am working on adding Twitter followers for clients.” This develops the idea in the minds of people seeing your messages that you are the guy who does ____ (whatever your business is). And I have found that this is a socially acceptable message to put on Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites, and works much better than constant messages to “buy my products!” You can occasionally tell people to buy your products but if you do it all the time, people will just block you or un-follow you. 

The 2,000 Glass Ceiling

There is a particular phenomenon to be aware of on Twitter. Once you reach 2,000 people that you are following on Twitter, it will not allow you to add any more until you have over 2,000 people following you.

So you can follow this strategy of just following people and getting them to follow you, un-following those who don’t, rinse and repeat. But, in order to get your followers over 2,000, you have to use the other strategy of putting out regular tweets with keywords in them and get people to follow you that way. That’s how I got my own account over 2,000. I have two other accounts close to 2,000 now and that’s the strategy I’m using.

Good luck with your Twitter marketing.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Using Facebook to Promote a Business

by John Eberhard

Facebook is a great medium to promote your business and get more people hiring you for whatever you do. I think it is equally workable for small businesses and for big ones too.

The first thing to do once you have a Facebook account, is to get lots of Facebook “friends.” You do this by finding people that you want to be your friend on Facebook and proposing to them to be Facebook friends. I currently have 3861 Facebook friends. The max they will allow you is 5,000.

The way I built up this fairly large list was to work it a little bit each day. Initially I found people I knew and proposed being Facebook friends to them. Then I started connecting to people who had 20 or more mutual friends. Now that I have a fairly large friends list I am a little more selective now, proposing being friends to people who have 30 or more mutual friends.

What to Communicate on Facebook

Facebook allows you to post what is called a status update as often as you like, and this will then go out to all your Facebook friends. It will appear to them in their feed of items from their friends. You can post just text, or you can upload photos, a video, or post a link to some other page on the web.

I have found it to be very effective to post text 1-3 times a day, saying what I am working on with my business. For example, for me, being a web designer and Internet marketer, I post things like:

• I am designing a new web site for a landscape designer
• Working on a search engine optimization project for a new client
• Just closed a new client for pay per click advertising setup and management
• Working on social media marketing for a client
• Reviewing my pay per click advertising client accounts

This method is extremely effective in letting people know what I do, and putting it out there that I am the guy who does Internet marketing services. It keeps establishing in people’s minds that that is who I am. Plus it shows people that I am busy and getting a lot of work. I recently saw some people at an event, that I had not seen in a while, and the lady said “I see you’re pretty busy.” I inquired as to what had given her that impression, and she said Facebook.

It is also important to post status updates occasionally about your personal life, like your weekend trip, or that your kids are coming over for Thanksgiving, or commenting on how your favorite sports team is doing, or posting a link to some video you like. I have been known to post a link to an article on politics once in a while, as that is an area of strong interest for me.

Here is what you do NOT want to do. You do not want to post status updates all the time that say “Buy my stuff,” “Come to my webinar,” “Buy my book,” “Attend my seminar,” “Buy my CD.” It is OK to do this once in a while. But if you do it all the time and every communication you send out to Facebook is pitching something for your business, it sort of offends the agreement of what Facebook is for, and people will either un-friend you, or block your updates. Or at least be annoyed. Surprisingly I do see some people do this, supposed gurus who should know better.

I find it much more workable to simply post updates on what I am doing. It puts out there what I do and what I am doing, in a way that people do not find offensive. I have followed this same technique with my client social media marketing accounts and it has worked well for them as well.

Following these techniques you will find that you can get new business from Facebook.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

The Full Social: How to Put the Pedal to the Metal with Social Media Marketing

by John Eberhard

Most people these days are familiar with Facebook and Twitter, and maybe MySpace and LinkedIn. And certainly Facebook and Twitter are the two 800 pound gorillas in the room with social media marketing.

But what if you’re not content with just using one or two sites for social media marketing? What if you want to really put the pedal to the metal? Go the distance? Be a world class social media marketer?

The Full Social

As a nod to “The Full Monty” movie I am outlining the Full Social, which is a program of all or nearly all of the social media marketing actions one can take.

First Tier Sites

The first tier social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. The importance of these sites is roughly in that order. The goal is to start accounts, get lots of friends or followers, then put out regular updates on what you are doing with your business. The idea is that by putting out regular updates on what you are doing, you keep yourself high in people’s awareness as the provide of ____ (your product or service). You should also post things occasionally about your personal life, and comment on other people’s posts, so as to develop and maintain engagement. I recommend that people start an account on Ping.fm and hook up all your accounts to it. Then you can post your status updates from Ping.fm and they go out to all the sites at once.

Creating a Facebook fan page gets you a really high quality link to your site or sites, but so many people are doing these now that it is getting harder to get lots of fans.

Second Tier Sites

The second tier social media sites include Plaxo, Plurk, FriendFeed, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and PerfSpot. Same handling as above.

YouTube

Some people consider YouTube a first tier site but it is sort of in its own category because of the way it is used. The idea is to create some videos that promote your business and then get them up on YouTube. Be sure to include your web address and some of your top keywords in the description box. Creating videos these days is not that expensive, using a Flip camera and software such as Camtasia. But it is definitely time consuming.

Squidoo And HubPages

Squidoo.com and HubPages.com are similar in that you can start an account and put up pages on any given topic. You can add pictures, videos, links to your blog and so on, to your pages. For a while these two sites were devalued by Google for some reason but that is over now. The pages you create give you very high quality links and both sites get a lot of traffic. Squidoo is much more friendly to marketing than HubPages, which only allows you to put one link per page.

Business Directories

There are a variety of social media business directories online today, where you can create a listing for your business that includes your contact info, a company description, and links to all your web sites. Some of the sites include HotFrog.com, AboutUs.org, and Mashable.com. One of the advantages of putting up listings on these sites, aside from people seeing your listing and contacting you, is that these listings create very high quality links back to your web site.

Blogging

Blogging is really its own activity but some people consider that it falls under social media. I recommend creating a main blog, using either Wordpress or Typepad, then post something to it weekly. I also recommend starting blog accounts on the free blogging sites, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, LiveJournal.com, and Blog.com. Then using your Posterous.com account, you can hook up all your other blogs to it (including your main blog) and posting on Posterous.com will then send your content out to all your blogs at once. Be sure to include 1-3 links in your post back to your main web site. Some people, when I mention this setup, voice concern over “duplicative content penalties.” However, Google states there is no such penalty so this is apparently a stubborn urban legend. Make sure to send out a “ping” or notification to all the blog search engines after each post, using Pingomatic.com.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking is a way for people to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Top bookmarking sites include Delicious.com, Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, and Reddit.com. Aside from being a sort of online listing of your favorite web pages, each counts as a link. So you can create bookmarks of all your web sites, individual pages within the sites, and of your blogs.

Summary

Pursuing a full program of social media marketing will get your company out there broadly across the Internet, create a lot of links to your site, put your regular communications in front of a lot of people, and drive in business.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous