Real Web Marketing Blog

Marketing with Facebook and Twitter

by John Eberhard

Facebook and Twitter are the biggest social media sites right now. Both can be used effectively for marketing purposes, but you have to know how.

Facebook Marketing

There are three main ways to market oneself on Facebook, through a personal profile page, through a corporate or “fan” page, and with pay per click advertising.

Facebook’s pay per click program is pretty good, but that’s a topic for another article. As for Facebook’s corporate or fan pages, many, many companies are putting these up right now, and I for one get half a dozen “become a fan of my page” messages per day. So I think this medium is getting a bit saturated and the effectiveness is dropping thereby, unless you are already a celebrity or well known.

That leaves the personal profile page, and I have found this to be a very effective way to market my business and I have gotten business from it. They key is to build up lots of friends. First, find a bunch of your personal friends, and add them. Then formulate a strategy for adding people that you don’t know to your friends list. I have had the policy of adding people who have 20 or more friends in common with me.

On your home page, on the top right is a section called “Requests,” and if you have any requests pending and click on this, you will see a column on the right that says “Suggestions.” This list shows 4 people you could propose to be Facebook friends with, and under each person’s name, it shows how many mutual friends they have with you. This is a handy way of going through and finding people who have a lot of mutual friends. I sometimes get someone emailing me after I’ve sent them a friend request, saying “Do I know you?,” to which I respond “No, but we have a lot of mutual friends.” They almost always then approve it after that.

Twitter Marketing

The first thing with Twitter is that you have to have a lot of followers, otherwise no one will see your communications. You need to build up your followers to 1,000, 2,000 or more. The usual way to get a lot of followers is to follow someone and then they will in most cases follow you back.

Of course this is time consuming. The first thing you should do is to search for some of your friends who you figure might be on Twitter and them follow them. Then you need to come up with a strategy for adding followers that are potential clients or customers for your business.

There are a number of software packages or online services that will automate the following process to one degree or another. Tweet Adder is an excellent tool. I have recently started using TweetSpinner.com, a free tool (with paid upgrade for more features). TweetSpinner allows you to automatically “un-follow” people you have followed but have not followed you in return. You press the “purge” button and it will “un-follow” 20 of these people at a time, and you can do this multiple times in one session.

TweetSpinner will also allow you to automatically follow people who have followed you but you haven’t followed back yet, 20 at a time. You can also select a keyword, and the system will locate people who have used that keyword in their messages, or “tweets” (I’m glad I didn’t come up with that word), and then follow 30 of them at a time. By selecting the right keywords, this can be effective in allowing one to target people who are potential clients, in that they are discussing topics relevant to your business. Then a certain percentage of them will follow you back.

So the method I have found effective is to jockey these two factors back and forth; adding new people that you are following, then a few days later, un-following those that didn’t follow you back. Rinse and repeat.

Communications Out

I use a site called Ping.fm and have my Twitter and Facebook personal profile hooked up to it, so that when I post something on Ping, it automatically goes out to my Facebook and Twitter (and other) accounts. Ping.fm limits you to 140 characters similar to Twitter, so it is an ideal tool to save time for posting to these sites like Twitter that allow you only a short message.

You have to find a strategy for what to post that will work for you. This should not be “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff,” as this is frowned upon in social media in general and will turn people off. If you are constantly pitching your products or services in your status updates, people will remove you from their friend or follower list.

A strategy I have used that has worked for me is to post messages several times a day, saying what I am working on with my business. For example, if I just designed a new web site or blog, I post a link to it. Or I’ll say that I am working on a new pay per click advertising account for a client, or sending out press releases, or writing a marketing plan. I will occasionally post something saying I’m offering my book on sale or here is a link to a free white paper, but I limit the frequency of that.

This approach is relatively non-offensive to the social media universe and tends to reinforce daily that I am an Internet marketing consultant and I offer these services. So it keeps it in people’s minds that I do that. And this has worked for me and has gotten me business. And I believe it can work for you too.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

Leveraging Your Time in Website Marketing

by John Eberhard

There are many things you can do to market yourself or your business online. The thing is that many of these things can be quite time consuming. So it’s smart to find ways to better leverage your time – in other words, to get more done in a given amount of time. I want to discuss a couple ways to do this in this article.

Microblogging from One Source

Microblogging is a term that has sprung up recently to describe social media web sites like Twitter and Facebook where people are posting short little updates on what they are doing. You can also do this on other sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Plurk, and many others.

First of all, you should get on a few of these sites and see what types of things people post in their “status updates.” As I have stated before, you should not be pitching your stuff all day long because people will just “unfriend” you, or on some sites like Facebook they can hide your posts so they never appear even though you are still a Facebook “friend.” So first observe how other handle this (or mishandle it) before you start posting tons of stuff. My personal experience has been that it’s OK to post stuff about your business as long as it is not always a pitch, and as long as you also sprinkle in posts on other aspects of your life.

So a problem that comes up when you start microblogging, i.e. posting status updates about your life and business, is: how do you do this without spending all day on it? How do you get around logging into eight different sites and posting things on each one?

The answer is to use a site that allows you to connect up to all your social media accounts, and send out one message from one place that goes out to all of them. I use a site called Ping.fm, and I currently have it set up so that when I type something in the status update box and hit submit, it goes out to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Plurk, Mashable, FriendFeed, Xanga, Delicious, and Vox.

There are other sites that do this as well, such as FriendFeed and Posterous.com. However, I just learned this week that FriendFeed was bought by Facebook and there are rumors that that site may be going away soon. And I will be recommending another use for Posterous.com in the next section. so I recommend Ping.fm. Once you have your accounts set up on these other sites, it’s easy to set up a Ping.fm account and hook up your other accounts to it.

Of course, bear in mind that you still have to log in to each of these sites at least occasionally, add friends, see what other people are doing, and interact with them.

Blogging on Steroids

Now I’m going to talk about regular blogging, i.e. with longer articles or press releases. There are a number of blogging sites. The most common ways to make a blog are with Wordpress or Typepad. But there are also some free blog sites where you can sign up and put up a free blog, such as Wordpress.com, Blogger.com (which is affiliated with Google), Tumblr.com and more.

So you set up your multiple blog accounts on these various blog sites. Then you set up an account on a site called Posterous.com, and hook it up to all your blog sites. Now you can post an article or release within your Posterous.com account, and it will be posted to all those blogs at the same time. In fact, you can even send an email to an address they give you (after you set up all this stuff) and it will go out to all your blog sites and be posted there. I prefer to do it through the online interface because it allows me to put in links and pictures.

You can also use Posterous.com to post to Twitter, Facebook and other “micro” blogging sites. But I am separating these out and using Posterous.com for the regular blogs, and using Ping.fm for the micro blogging because you can’t really send a whole long article via Ping.fm.

By the way, I found out about Posterous.com through the Thirty Day Challenge, a terrific online free training program being run by Australian Ed Dale.

I believe these two tools are a great way to maximize your time spent on website marketing.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

More Social Media Marketing Tips

by John Eberhard

The last few weeks I’ve been writing mostly about social media marketing, on a good overall strategy and which sites you should concentrate on. In this article I’m going to give some more tips on some of the top social media sites.

Facebook

The key on Facebook is first of all to get a lot of “friends.” You propose to someone that they be your Facebook “friend.” My advice is to start out with your actual friends, then start looking at their friends lists and add more of your friends. Then start adding people who have a certain number of friends in common but that you don’t know personally (I do this for people who have 20 common friends). A very small number will write back to you and say “Do I actually know you?” but most will just approve you. For those who write say “No, but we have a lot of friends in common.” Only the most uptight will refuse even then. I have built up 1,700 friends this way.

Having a lot of friends will allow you to promote your business, although you have to do it in a certain way. You can post “status updates” which contain data about what you’re doing business-wise. Such as:

• I just finished designing a new web site (with a link to it)
• I am working on managing client pay per click advertising
• Here is my new video on YouTube (with a link)
• Here is a new ebook I am offering (with a link)

I have observed that if you are linking to something, especially to some kind of property like a book or white paper or something, that tends to generate more interest.

But you can’t keep posting the same thing every day or even post things about your business all the time. Intersperse it with personal stuff, such as things about your recent vacation or your kids or comments about other things. If you use the status update to hammer people about your business offerings all the time, they will “un-friend” you or there is an option to hide your status updates and they might do that.

You can also start a corporate page on Facebook. The way they intended people use the site is that each account is for a person, but for companies, you start a corporate or fan page. Then get your friends to become fans of your business page. The corporate pages can contain your company info and contact info, pictures, videos, and it can link to your blog so that every new blog post appears on the corporate page.

Twitter

With Twitter, you write updates about what you’re doing or post comments about things. But you only have 140 characters to do it. On Twitter want to get a lot of people following you.

One of the first things you want to do on Twitter is seek out your actual friends. You can look them up and find them. You can also go to sites like WeFollow.com and choose to follow various celebrities, musicians, news organizations and so on. You can also use Twitter’s search function, enter some keywords there, and see who is posting things on that topic, then choose to follow them.

Now you start posting things on Twitter about what you are doing, keeping it under 140 characters each time. Use different keywords in the post, describing what you are doing with your business.

By using keywords that you think other people might look up using the search function, you will now start getting people to follow you who have an interest in what you are doing. I have been doing this using keywords like “pay per click advertising,” “social media,” “web design” and so on, and have been getting a fair amount of followers added each day.

I have also observed that if you add a link to some kind of property that you have produced, like I mentioned before, such as a book, video, ebook or whatever, that seems to really increase the number of people following you.

Summary

One of the key aspects of marketing is the collection of identities. Your friends on Facebook and your followers on Twitter are identities to whom you can promote your business offerings.

As mentioned you should show some judgment on how you do this. Don’t hammer them all the time with the same offerings. Intersperse it with personal stuff or comments about current events. Observe how others do it. You have to stay real with the general agreement of how that site is operated.

But if you do that, these sites can be a powerful way to reach new people with your message.

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The Social Media Gateway Page

by John Eberhard

I have just started providing a new service to clients, the creation of a “social media gateway page.” This is a web page that gives information about you or your company, and also contains links to your presences on various social media web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and so on. The page also contains links to any web sites or blogs you maintain, all your contact information, and can contain links to any products you sell or any other activities in which you are involved, such as hobbies, charities and so on.

You can see one of these gateway pages that I just produced for my client Stan Dubin here.
http://www.flourishandprosper.com

The purpose of such a page is to easily allow anyone interested in you, your activities or your company, to connect up with you on these social media sites and follow your activities. Another purpose is to connect and display all the varied activities in which you are involved, all in one place.

For instance, if the person visiting this social media gateway page is a Facebook user, this page makes it easy for them to find your Facebook profile and become one of your Facebook friends. Once connected, he will be able to see and follow your regular Facebook status updates.

If the person visiting this page is a Twitter user, the gateway page makes it easy for them to find you on Twitter and become one of your followers. Then they will be able to see your regular updates on Twitter.

Similarly, people can connect up and follow your activities on MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, or a variety of other social media sites.

A social media gateway page can be put up on a separate domain (i.e. www.yourname.com) or as a sub-page on one of your existing web sites (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/gatewaypage).

If you or your company have a lot of activities going on, a social media gateway page is a great way to connect up people to you and get them following your updates on social media sites.

In the case of my client Stan Dubin, whom I mention above, he has a presence on Facebook, three accounts on Twitter (one each for three different activities he is involved in), a presence on LinkedIn, Skype, StumbleUpon, and a V-card (which gives all his contact information). Stan’s gateway page also contains links to several web sites that he runs for employee testing, marriage tips and online marketing tips, and contains links to two books that he has written (where people can buy them of course). And of course the page contains his phone, address and email.

We can create such a page for you, and we can also do two additional actions for you if required:

1. We can set up accounts for you on a wide variety of social media web sites, and
2. We can maintain these social media sites, work the account to add lots of friends, followers, etc., post regular updates on your activities, and respond for you to people communicating to you on these sites.

I believe this type of social media gateway page contains a lot of potential for many people, particularly if you are active on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites, and if you have a number of activities and want to tie them all together in one place. It will definitely aid you in connecting with more people, which is basically what social media is all about.

Social Media: What Works, Not Just the Latest Shiny Object

by John Eberhard

Eric Qualman, in a recent article on Search Engine Watch, talks about how many companies will jump on the social media bandwagon just because everyone is talking about a certain site. He likens it to following the latest “shiny object.”

I try to keep up on the latest social media trends and websites. But I also temper this with the fact that I don’t really care about the latest shiny object or seeming cool. I want to use techniques, media, and websites that will actually get results for clients. And the bottom line is driving actual traffic to a website, and getting leads and sales.

Last week I talked about a bigger, more expansive social media marketing program. In this article I want to talk a little bit more about how to get results with some of these various media.

Regular Engagement

With Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, the key is not just to start an account on these sites, but to be engaged with your account and with others there on a regular basis.

This means, first of all, to develop a decent number of “friends” on Facebook and MySpace, “followers” on Twitter, and “connections” on LinkedIn. Start with your actual friends or business connections, then start connecting with their friends.

Secondly, it means posting something on those accounts regularly, preferably daily or even more than once a day. Tell people what you are doing in relation to your business, such as “I just closed a new big account,” or, for me for instance “I just completed designing a new web site for a client,” and then including the link to the site. You can post things about your personal life too, and intersperse these with the business related stuff, such as “just got back from a great weekend at Big Bear Lake” or something like that.

After posting links to various web sites I had designed recently, a Facebook friend wrote me and wanted a meeting, then signed up for a web design project. The point is that if you have a good number of friends or connections, and you communicate about your activities (but not in a non-stop, obnoxious way) you will connect with people who need your services and you will get business.

My friend and client Stan Dubin was recently talking to me about Twitter, as he has had good success there with 3,000 followers. He said the key is to post things regularly, and to engage in actual conversations with people. He also advised people to start multiple accounts on there for the various activities you do, such as one for your business, one for being a musician (if you are), one for your hobby, etc. He has three accounts on Twitter.

I started posting more than once a day on Twitter for my website marketing activities, using various keywords in the posts such as “web design,” “pay per click advertising,” “social media marketing,” and so on, and immediately started getting 20-25 new followers per day. So when you post Twitter try to use keywords in your posts that you think people will search for.

Summary

So the moral of the story is to communicate regularly on these social media sites, engage in conversations, make friends, and don’t be afraid to communicate about your business (but not non-stop). Business will follow.

A Full Social Media Marketing Program

by John Eberhard

Social media marketing is a challenge.. The trick is not to put up a presence on some of the sites (that’s easy), the trick is to figure out how to use that presence to market yourself and actually help your business. And the trick is also to not just spend a lot of time on these sites, but to make that time well spent.

The first thing to know about social media sites is that most of them are for the purpose of social contact with other people. In most cases, with some exceptions, they are not primarily for the purpose of marketing yourself or your business.

That doesn’t mean you can’t promote your business on social media. But you have to do it tactfully and you have to get a feel for each site and the general agreement level on how much it is OK to promote.

Let’s talk about some of the top social media sites:

Facebook and MySpace

Facebook and MySpace are similar in how to interact with them. The basics are:

1. Sign up lots of friends. I first located a lot of my personal friends and business associates, then starting proposing being friends to people who had 20 or more friends in common. I have built up over 1,500 friends on Facebook in this way.
2. Put up a corporate page for your business. Ask your friends to sign up as fans for the corporate page.
3. Post something regularly (daily) in your status bar, including promoting your business. But work these promotions in between personal notes too, posting pictures, doing quizzes, etc. If you are just pitching yourself and your business every day it will turn some people off and they’ll turn off your posts or disconnect you as a friend.

Twitter

Start an account on Twitter, start following people that you know and in your line of business. Then start building up lots of followers. You do this by posting things regularly (daily), especially about your work and what you’re doing. Observe how others use the site, especially those with lots of followers, and emulate their example.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business directory, probably the biggest among many. So start an account on there and start making connections with people you know and business associates. Then search their connections and connect with more people. Then post things regularly on what is happening with your business. Here it is a business directory so you don’t have to intersperse it with comments about your girlfriend or the movie you just saw.

YouTube

YouTube is the biggest of many video sharing sites. So the first trick is get a video produced about your business, and then upload it to YouTube and other sharing sites. Your video can be simple, i.e. a slide show video. It is better to have a number of short videos than one long one. YouTube has a time limit of 10 minutes, so your video has to shorter than that. When you upload the video, make sure you add in keywords and your URL. Also make sure the end of your video shows your URL and phone number.

Squidoo and HubPages

Squiddo.com allows you to put up a “lens” which is basically a page, on pretty much any topic you want. You can enter anchor text into the text of your article, because guess what, Squidoo is “friendly” to using their site to market things.

When you create a Squidoo lens, it can contain an intro with picture, the main article, photos from Flickr.com, videos from YouTube, links to your web sites and blogs, a guestbook for people to leave comments, and a place to put your Delicious.com links. So you can put up a lot of content related to your main article.

HubPages.com is another site you can use to put up articles. Unfortunately, they are not quite so friendly to the guys from the marketing department, and they will  shut down pages for being overly promotional if they contain more than ONE link to your web site or sites. On HubPages you can put up your article (with one link), photos, links, an RSS feed, news, comments, and a poll. So you can add a rich palette of content to these pages as well.

Social Media Directories

There are many social media business directories, such as Plaxo, HotFrog, FriendFeed, Xanga, Vox, Mashable, iKarma and many more (over 40). The idea is to put up a listing for your company, with a picture, company description, service or product list, contact info, and links to your web sites and blogs. Also include links to your other social media accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. And the idea is to put it up on every single directory you can find. On many of these sites you can post regular updates on your activities and you should do so.

Social Bookmarking Sites

There are two purposes of social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon. One is to create an account and put in bookmarks to all your favorite sites, making it easy to find your favorite stuff. Another is to bookmark your site and various pages on your site, your blog, your social media pages and so on, and each of those bookmarks will count as a link to those pages. This helps with search engine ranking and it can help people to find those pages as well.

Summary

1. Start accounts and corporate pages on Facebook and MySpace, then get lots of friends, then post regularly on your business, interspersed with personal posts.
2. Start accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn, then post things to them on a regular basis.
3. Get some videos of your business and post on YouTube and other video sharing sites.
4. Put up article pages on Squidoo and HubPages
5. Put up a listing on every social media business directory under the sun, moon and stars with links to as many of your social media pages as you can. Then post updates on your activities.
6. If you can put updates on all these sites daily, that is ideal

If you do all that and post updates to these accounts on a regular basis, it will have quite a positive impact for your business.

Twitter Basics

by John Eberhard

Here are two articles by Ron Jones on Search Engine Watch that give some basics on how to get the most from Twitter:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3633223

http://searchenginewatch.com/3633276

Social Media Madness - The Final Four

by John Eberhard

Eric Qualman of Search Engine Watch has continued with his series of reviewing social media sites and deciding which ones are best, using the metaphor of the March Madness college basketball finals. He is now down to his final four - which in this case are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia.

I agree with this assessment. It's interesting to me that MySpace didn't make it to his final four. I've been an avid Facebook user for about a year, and do have an account on MySpace but have never been able to get into it. I do not find it very useful and the interface seems stupid to me. Oh well.

Qualman is using votes to determine the winners, which we'll see in another week.

Social Media Madness, Part 2

Eric Qualman of Search Engine Watch has come up with a clever idea in rating the top social media sites by comparing it to the college basketball "March Madness" competition. He is doing a series of articles rating the top social media sites, listing their strengths and weaknesses. The second article rates Wikipedia, Hi5, Digg and Hulu.

http://searchenginewatch.com/3633032

Some Samples of Social Media Pages

by John Eberhard

I wanted to show you some samples of pages we have created for a client and for our company, on Squidoo.com and HubPages.com. These pages create great links to your web sites and blogs. The first thing to know is that you can take some article you have written, and put it up on both these sites, and the page can also include links to your sites, pictures, and videos.

I want to also comment that I like Squidoo a lot more than HubPages, who gets snippy and refuses to put up your content if you have more than one link to any one of your sites or blogs. They say that's overly promotional. Squidoo is a lot more down with any marketing you want to do using their medium.

Links for Novus Detox:

Who Needs to Come to a Drug Detox Facility?
Is My Job Protected if I get Substance Abuse Treatment?
Mad in America
The Latest Drug Company Scam
After Leaving Novus - What Should I Do?
Benzodiazepines
Antipsychotics
Letter to the FDA

Links for RealWebMarketing.net

Pay Per Click Advertising: it's All About Conversions
Online PR and a Blog
Don't Stop Promoting in Uncertain Economic Times
Social Media Marketing and Anchor Text
Videos on the Web
The New Recipe for Search Engine Rankings
Marketing with Facebook
Marketing with Facebook Part 2

Links for Novus Detox:

Zinq Deficiency Causes ADHD and Depression
Prescription Drug Addiction: Methadone is the #1 Killer
Teen Prescription Drug Addiction Rising, and Parents Are Not Helping
Who Should Come to a Drug Detox Facility
Feeling Anxious, Depressed? Prescription Drug Addiction is Not the Solution
Prescription Drug Addiction Crackdown Announced in California
Opioid Prescription Drug Addiction More Likely After Adolescent Abuse

Links for RealWebMarketing.net

Pay Per Click Advertising: it's All About Conversions
Online PR and a Blog
Don't Stop Promoting in Uncertain Economic Times
Website Marketing in the Current and Future Economy
Pay Per Click Advertising: Increasing Conversions
Blogs an Integral Part of Website Marketing