Category: Social Media

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The Social Connection Phenomena But Should You Take the Plunge?

If you use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, a blog, and other online news and link sharing tools you are ahead of the curve and taking full advantage of some of the newest ways to drive traffic to your website, connect with readers, and share news and information. If you are not doing these things, should you be? Where should you invest your time? How should you get started?

First, if you are doing any of the things I mentioned and you are serious about growing your website presence, want to start to lower your pay per click budget, and want to tap into new ways to reach customers, it is time for you to get involved.

If you are not willing to invest the time or money to dive into the social connection phenomena that is growing on the Web, this may not be the right time for you personally to get involved. However as time marches on, don’t sit on the fence too long as those that are embracing these new media resources will have the leg up on you for organic web position and web authority over time.

For those of you that say YES, I am ready and feel that I have been missing out on the social connection and am ready to get started here is the plan I suggest.

  1. Get involved with Twitter right away. It is easy to use and you don’t need to hire a writer if you have time. Tweet three to five times a day. Provide value of cool sites you find on the Web, interesting articles in your field. Take a moment to thank others for retweets and comment on other’s tweets. Remember this is about connection and conversation.
  2. Integrate Twitter badges and your Twitter feed with your blog and website. You may need help in this area, but make sure you are promoting that you are using these cool tools to your audience.
  3. Start on Facebook right away.  Don’t get hung up on doing a private page for friends and lock out business resources. Do a fan page but don’t lock your personal page and open up your fan page. Why? It creates so many problems with application interaction and auto status posting and scheduling applications when you do this. I recommend using your website email address for a Facebook page. Accept anyone as a friend to this site. Consider it your business face. If you want to build a fan page for your business do that as well tied to this business site. If you want a Facebook page just for personal friends and family set up another account but tied to a different email address not the one tied to your domain. Lock this one down and point your family and friends to this much smaller private site.
  4. Get going with LinkedIn, Tagged, Naymz and other social sites that make sense for you. There are services that you can use to auto publish your status at these locations with one click to make it easy for you. Even if you don’t regularly update these sites, set up profiles and work them for a bit to at least get a presence.
  5. If you are not blogging, you need to get going right now. You may want to hire a writer. You will most likely need help getting the blog set up and integrated with your website. The minimum posting we recommend is three times a week with about 200 to 250 words per post. Don’t snatch content and paste it in your blog post. You need unique content – there’s no fooling Google.
  6. Optional – you can integrate into your website Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect features. These can be fun and help other to share and comment on your content.

The big key to take away from this blog post is that to just have these social services and a blog is not enough. You must use them and work them. I have found that if you do not work to connect with others your friend list, followers, and subscribers will not grow. Having them is not enough, you must use them to reap the benefits.

The benefits are huge and will play an even bigger factor in organic search placement in the very near future. If you don’t believe that, check out Monday’s blog post on Google’s experimental Social Search feature. There is no rolling back the clock, social media is here to stay. Now it becomes a factor of are you going to embrace it and get the visibility and “authority” before your competitors do?

This post is not about selling, but rather information, but we do offer many services that can help you grab the “gold ring” when it comes to social media. Check out our website for more information on our services.

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The Power of Social Bookmarking Sites

Okay, I am not a big embracer of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, but I may need to rethink my position on these services. This past week I got an incredible amount of traffic on my blog and many, many comments on one fairly innocuous blog post. I was mystified over the traffic and wondered what had caused the spike.

Finally, in one of the comments left by a reader the mystery was solved. My blog post was bookmarked and made it to the home page of Reddit, a social bookmarking site. I had an AHA moment.

Social bookmarking is a way for others to share and comment on pages they find on the web. Instead of posting a note on Twitter of Facebook with a new site that you love and a link, if you rate the site on Reddit, Digg or one of the other popular social bookmarking sites you share the news with a huge network.

Based on my findings I am seriously considering writing my next whitepaper on social bookmarking and how to use it to drive traffic. Typically a whitepaper takes me about 30 days or longer to research and write so it may be a month or two before I report my findings but it sure seems like time to put the full social media arsenal together for our clients and readers.

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How Do You Grow a Twitter Following?

You don’t need to buy a white paper or an e-book to understand how to grow your Twitter following, but you can benefit from some of my own tried and tested techniques that I will freely share in this post.

First let me share with you some statistics from client accounts showing their actual growth over time.

Client One: start=0, 8/13= 187 followers, 9/1=308 follower, 10/241 566 followers

Client Two: start=0, 8/13=89 followers, 9/1=220 followers, 10/21 371 followers

Client Three: start=0, 9/1=64 followers, 9/14=117 followers, 10/21=320 followers

To put this in perspective here is the traffic for a client account we started but did not provide services for in the same time period showing natural growth as a control.

Client A: start=0, 8/13=5 followers, 9/1=11 followers, 10/24=18 followers.

That’s a pretty big difference 303 to 547 followers versus 18 in the same time period.

So how do we do it? Here are my tips:

  1. Tweet a minimum of 5 times a day.
  2. Tweet 5 days a week.
  3. Schedule your tweets to start at 8:00 am and then space them out to about 4:00 pm.
  4. Include tips and trivia in your tweets as well as links.
  5. Become the authority in your area – share your knowledge.
  6. Interact a minimum of twice daily with followers of people you follow through direct messages or @’s
  7. Thank people for retweets.
  8. Send comments to others about their tweets – I really liked what you said about …
  9. Use bit.ly to track your clicks. Once you see that people do click what you link to you will know the value of the time you invest in Twitter.
  10. Get professional help if you don’t know what to do. We do provide Twitter services if you need them.
  11. Make sure you follow and unfollow anyone who follows or unfollow you using Social Oomph.
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How to Use IE Web Slices in Your Web Pages

IE 8 has a cool new feature that some websites can and should use, it is called a web slice. In essence this is a small section of your page that you update either manually or dynamically with a script shows content that a reader can subscribe to. With this snippet subscribers can see any new entries you add in their browser when you add them.

Here is an example on one of my own pages: http://www.mccordweb.com/web-design/web-design-templates.php. On the right of the content you will see a gray box that says MWS New Templates. If you mouse over this box and have IE 8, a green icon will show to the top left of the content. Additionally take a quick look in the browser bar and you will see a new green web slice icon has also been illuminated. If you mouse over the slice box in the content you can choose to subscribe to this snippet. IE will place a link to this snippet over the tabs section.

Once you have subscribed, anytime I change this section, add a new link, a new photo, etc. your browser link will show the new updated content. You can view the content on demand. If you even want to remove this code snippet. Just right click the item above the tabs and select delete.

I have to say I spent a few hours learning how to set up  and style the snippet to make it look good. Here is a great tutorial on how to make the code that I used at CODE Magazine. The code is pretty straight forward. What took time was to figure out how to style the snippet that showed in IE. I found the first div tag controls the font color, size, and back ground. If you do not style this first div tag IE will pick up your own website body tag background and coloring which in some cases can be a problem. Testing and tweaking to style it properly may take a bit of time using trial and error, but once you get it, you will be able to quickly add the same syntax to other pages or web slices.

How would a website use web slices? Well the possibilities are endless. Some sites may choose to show current coupon codes, showcase  new features, highlight new products, introduce specials or other timely information. You don’t need to programmatically insert information. I am not a programmer and once your shell is styled and set up to your liking you can embed this on any page and just change the content using regular HTML.

So take a look at my web slice page, subscribe, and see what you think.