Are you starting your social media marketing experience? There are many sites to consider as part of your overall networking and marketing efforts. To get started I highly recommend acquiring and reading the book Groundswell written by two Forrester Research Analysts in the Social Media movement and how company should get involved to connect with their target audience in a proactive manner. Your company will be discussed, touted, praised and yes have potentially negative comments made about it too. You will have no control over it - but you do have control over being part of the conversation. What you can do is be proactive, get involved and if negative comments come up, be open to constructive criticism and respond in a open and helpful way.
There are many sites to choose to start your social media marketing. Here we'll focus on Twitter as it is one gaining considerable popularity (www.twitter.com). Here at www.syndetech.com you can syndicate your Tweets to your syn*det"ech profile by adding Twitter as one of your applications. On Twitter like all social media sites, I encourage you to "engage" your followers. Don't make it only about you, your organization and your efforts.. spread the love :-). Respond to their Tweets if you can and is appropriate. Ask questions of your followers and if you like use a # with a name after it to track your responses. Retweet with the RT symbol. When you do that you are rebroadcasting what someone else Tweets... it may be an interesting posting. To do that respond to the original person so it put the @username RT then cool message they posted. Another thing is if you followed a link that someone else posted and you liked the content, let them know. Reply to them with a simple note such as, "@username Thanks for posting that article on the environment.. couldn't agree more...great read!!" By the way.. in Twitter, when your cursor is over a Tweet.. you should see two symbols to the right, the envelope with the arrow will automatically put the @username in your new message.
Depending on your market you may find you need a split personality to maintain your followers if you'd like to have both a company image and a personal image. The two sometimes do not make for the right mix. For example if you work in the finance / banking industry yet personally are vegetarian, you may find promoting investment stocks alongside sharing links to great vegan recipes to be a recipe for some to "unfollow" you. You may find it useful to have two accounts. One for business and one for personal. Don't worry, there are free tools discussed below to help you manage your account(s). Each may have a very different group of followers and totally different "feel". Put them together and it's all you. Most people has some separation between work and private life. Treat your online social marketing the same and you'll be glad you did. Treat it you company profile like you are at work and you are communicating with potential customers. Your personal account is just that. There may be followers with cross interests and that's ok. We sometimes find new friends via work and business via personal relationships. For most however that is not the vast majority to instances.
Your time is worth money right? So make the most of your Tweeting time by spreading your Tweets - syndicated it. Join syn*det"ech, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, MySpace. All of these sites allow you to add your Twitter feeds to your profile on their sites. All these sites are free to join so why not? Build your network on each because you may have some people like myself on everything you can imagine, but most folks pick one or two and that's it. So to market yourself to the broadest audience you have to be everywhere your potential connections are - within reason. The syndication of your Tweets help you spread your message to as many of your connected audience as possible in the most time efficient manner.
OK, here are a few other sites I use and find useful.
www.tweetlater.com allows you to manage multiple accounts. Auto follow and and send a nice short note back to people when they follow you. You can set up to 50 keyword searches and indicate the frequency you'd like it to email you your keyword report. You can also schedule Tweets to be sent and via which of your Twitter Accounts to use for each Tweet. You can also set it to UN-follow anyone who un-follows you. Karma baby! You'd be amazed. So many know about these auto-follow those who follow me.. and they follow you, then once they see you're following them, they un-follow you. They are only concerned with you following them and have no interest in you. They count on you "feeling bad" to un-follow someone like it's rude. Hey, if they're not interested in what you have to say then you likely aren't interested in them either.. so automate it!! There are a few people / organizations I follow who don't follow me back. But very very few. - like 5 out of 1500 followers.
www.dossy.org/twitter/karma allows you to mass un-follow those that aren't following you back and conversely mass follow those following you that you aren't following. It provides links to the person's Twitter home page should you want to check them out further. This is indispensible. There are many out who know about the tools to auto-follow anyone who follows you. Some play a numbers game and follow everyone and then when they see you've auto-followed them, they then un-follow you. These typically what I call "shouters". You can pick them out easily by checking out their Tweet flow. When you see someone has hundreds or thousands of followers, they are following a very low number and their update count is really high they are typically "shouters". Shouters don't engage in conversation. They don't care one bit about you and what you have to Tweet about. They only want to send broadcasts with links to their website or affiliates or news. The latter category you may be ok with if the news is a category you would like to have in your Twitter roll.
www.tweetgrader.com this tool provides a score for any Twitter ID you enter. It analyses the number of people you follow to the number of followers you have as well as the ratio of direct tweets, responding tweets and direct messages for that account. This ranking essentially tells how social and engaging you are as a Tweeter. The score is from 0 - 100%. A good Tweeter is in the 90% area.
www.twitscoop.com track a username or keyword to track conversations, topics or conferences. This provides insight it what is hot on Twitter at any given time.
www.monitter.com this tool helps you find exactly who you need to follow. It allows you to find local tweeters to build your local business. You may specify a postal/zip code and the distance from that you'd like to follow along with up to three key words. An example would be for a pizza shop to expand their business may enter their location zip code, choose 10 mile (lowest choice) radius and the key word "pizza". Every time someone tweets within that radius the word "pizza" the restaurant owner will know and can then follow them. The restaurant owner may then engage the pizza lover, enquire where s/he bought his last pizza from and how they liked it. This could be followed with a direct message (DM) with a coupon offer to try their pizza.
www.socialtoo.com turns your tweeting into fun and information gathering events. Add a survey to your tweeting. This tool also has the ability to auto-follow those who follow you. So there is some functional overlap between this and the www.tweetlater.com tool.
www.tweetburner.com this tool allows you to track your tweets and see how many clicks you get on the URLs you post in your tweets.
www.tweet-rank.de will provide you insight into which of your tweets attract followers. This will help you hone your tweet writing skills and improve your time efficiency by not tweeting on topics that receive no click-throughs or no new followers.
www.twellow.com allows you to you to find Tweeters based on their industry and interests. If you add yourself then others can find you. You can add yourself to up to 10 categories. As you browse the categories you then can see if you someone is already following you or you are following them. As Tweeters you can click the "click to follow" directly in the Twellow tool and it sends the information to Twitter. Social Bookmarking Tips
Want to buzz content from your blog or site to yet don't have the tim to social bookmark it to many sites? With one click you can bookmark on Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Furl, Newvine, and over 25 other social bookmarking sites with little effort. www.OnlyWire.com is a free tool that can social book mark your blog or any website. They have an ad-free version for only $24.99 a year.
Hope you found this helpful. Do you have any tools that you use and find helpful? Provide a comment with the sites / tools you find to provide you the best traffic. ------------ Do you have other tips for both small and large businesses to leverage technology effectively and efficiently? If so, share via a short blog, or ask your questions via your personal blog at www.syndetech.com. |
