Category: Social Media

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HootSuite Adds Yammer to Networks List

HootSuite - Social Media ManagementHootSuite has recently added Google+ to its linkable social networks and now has just added Yammer as well.

Yammer is a business-related social network. Businesses like IBM are using Yammer for interaction between employees. With popularity growing, some are considering Yammer as a new place to network similar to LinkedIn. For now I haven’t heard many clients asking for Yammer updates but it is a social network worth taking a look at, and now especially since you can schedule updates to Yammer using HootSuite.

Yammer is free to use but does have paid models as well. You can find more out about Yammer by visiting their website. Yammer states “Whether it’s for teams to collaborate on projects, company-wide collaboration to accelerate your business, or an intranet replacement that connects your enterprise, Yammer provides  a variety of pricing plans to meet your needs.” Pricing goes from free to $5 a month and then to $15 per user per month.

As for HootSuite, I love the product and like that they are staying up-to-date in regards to which social networks to integrate with their platform. You can try HootSuite for free or move to one of their paid programs. Just click the image above to find out more about HootSuite and their pricing. If you buy their upgraded program, they’ll buy us lunch at McDonald’s.

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Tips to Promote Your Website

In continuing with the last several blog posts on tips and tidbits, here are few of my top tips on how you can promote your website.

1. Promote your website with Google AdWords. If you need visibility and leads fast, Google AdWords is the best place to start. I recommend using AdWords for a boost right after you launch your website until you have enough impetus to garner organic placement and start generating activity on your own.

2. Make sure you are blogging. If you want to wean yourself off Google AdWords at some point, it is important to be actively involved in building unique informational content which over time will help you with organic placement and cause the natural building of inbound links.

3. Make sure you are building content on your website in addition to blogging. You’ll need more than blogging to garner placement. Consider doing articles smartly to get inbound links to your website. I don’t mean spin articles, but rather write thoughtful pieces that provide value.  Use social media to promote your articles, archive them on your website and place the articles on just a few article sites.

4. Use social media to promote your website, add value by not just talking about your own services, but make sure to work to create authority in all you do. Link to your site, your article pieces, and blogs as well as try to engage readers.

5.  Move into the wider world. Get active in your market sector on forums to tape into new ideas, thoughts, and share your expertise as well as learn from others. Share your website and yourself to get your name out there.

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What’s Worth the Trouble for Social Media?

For every client and business it will be different. For some it is Google+, others Facebook, others yet Twitter, and for some it is definitely LinkedIn. Much of where you should invest your time for social media is about your target audience.

If you are:

  • Consumer oriented – Facebook and Twitter are best
  • Selling mainly to executives and decision makers – LinkedIn is best
  • Selling nationally business to business or business to consumer – I like Twitter

Where you post and invest your time is based on your target market. Where ever you decide to participate, make sure you are still blogging. Activity on social media networks is not a replacement for blogging, but should be considered a supplement to blogging.

Why blogging?

  1. Blog posts are considered as if they are new pages on content.
  2. Blog posts build web authority for your website.
  3. Blog posts create interesting and new content for readers and search engine robots.

Remember…

Blogging is best done when it is on-domain versus at Blogspot.com or WordPress.com. You can feed your blog posts to Twitter and your Facebook wall and use a widget to show your blog posts to readers on LinkedIn. Blogging is about building your domain’s content. Social Media is off-domain and is about connecting with the wider web and sharing links to point to your website, social sites, and drive traffic to your website.

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Is Social Media Worth the Time? How to Tell

When you are busy there is no easier and faster task you want to drop than to stop updating your social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, but is that wise? Before you drop updating social media sites, make sure you are not hurting your web presence first.

How can you tell if social media is not driving traffic and activity on your site? It all starts with analysis. If you don’t routinely watch your website statistics on Google Analytics, you should. For my site, I watch the Social Sources in the Traffic Sources button to check my referrals. If you don’t see referrals from Twitter or Facebook there, don’t stop updating those services yet until you look a bit further.

I use HootSuite for my social updates and I can run link click and follower share reports in the control panel. This gives me a  more clear view of what is happening specifically with Twitter. To check what is happening with Facebook, I login as an administrator and review my Insights report.

Based on what you see, you may decide to cut back activity to a lower level if the numbers are not measurable, but I would not stop either service altogether. Google and Bing do look for social updates and sharing activity as part of their organic rankings. If social media is taking up too much time, I would ramp back first to a comfortable level.  Specifically, I might recommend one update a day for Facebook and three updates a day for Twitter.

Should you stop social media updates all together? I would only recommend doing so if you really cannot support the activity level, you see zero link shares, and no referrals when you review a six month period. I would be very slow to stop updating your networks all together. I have found that once you lose readership, after you have actively worked to build it for quite a while, that to get back in the game again is almost like starting from scratch. It is better to slow your activity than to stop totally.