Social Media Trends

January 27, 2011

Social media marketing- How to use Quora

This looks like it is a tool that will catch on and have some very good uses for businesses.
This post from Ben Ayers gives some very good tips:

1. For a snapshot of recent notifications, hover your cursor over the home link at the top of the page (if you see a red notification count). You’ll see a few sentences of highlights (as shown in the above screenshot).

2. Questions can be voted up or down. Voting a question up makes it appear in your stream against your profile.

3. Voting a question up also shares that question with your followers.

4. To cancel out your vote up, click the up arrow again. Do not click down to cancel the up, this will in fact collapse the question meaning it will not appear in your stream.

5. You can be public or anonymous on a thread. The option to do this is in the top right of the screen when you are looking at a question. If you choose to be anonymous, all of your interaction with that question will be marked as ‘anonymous user’ instead of linking to your profile. Anonymity does not follow through to other questions though – it’s a question-by-question option.

6. You can link to topics or people simply by typing in speech marks in your question or answer, like this link to Public Relations. As you type, the options appear for your link.

7. Follow people and topics that are of interest to you as this will make your Quora browsing experience infinitely more personalized and useful.

8. For privacy, you can ask Quora to not allow search engines to index your profile – i.e. your name. This is simple to control, under settings at the top of the page. Also simple to find in the same section is the ‘deactivate your account link’ should you want to do that.

9. Quora is very democratic – answers to questions only appear in reverse-chronological order by default. As soon as they start getting votes from readers, they move up or down based on popularity. So always try to say something useful as opposed to braggy, and it will do the site and your usefulness on it wonders.

10. Fill out your profile in as complete a way as you can, because it is very search engine friendly. After under one month on Quora personally, my profile already appears in Google’s front page of search results for my name.

January 26, 2011

How to male a Social media marketing campaign work

Everywhere you look you find companies and professionals trying to make their social media marketing efforts work and not seeing results. What possibly can they be doing wrong? At least at some point they attended a guru’s presentation, teleseminar or even a social media conference and heard: You have to be transparent, you have to be real! Well, they are transparent and real and still no return on their investment.
Here are a few ideas you need to take into consideration in your social media campaign that will help you get more traction with your audience, increase the level of trust and re-purpose content:
1. If you have a blog, re-purpose the content into a weekly video show or podcast. You will reach different audience and not have to work hard to reach this audience. Think of content as content and allow people to consume this content in different formats.
2. Weekly newsletter- The focal point here is to be constant and not if you want html or text only. Provide content people can use and see results and balance promotional calls. Send one at least once a month. Newsletters are a reliable source of leads and referrals.
3. When blogging invite people to leave comments, ask a question and when they interact, don’t forget to respond.
4. Interact with influencers. Who are the influencers in your industry? Do they have blogs, are they on Facebook? How about building some relationship here leaving comments on their blogs, like their comments on Facebook etc.
5. Don’t create more obstacles. Every day you will hear about something that is working. Use common sense. People are using pop ups to get names and e-mails? Good for them! But notice that usually you will lose 50% of your visitors after you show them the pop-up and they could be good prospects or refer someone else to you. Video only pages are converting well? Very good. By using this strategy you are leaving 15 million visually impaired people out of your funnel just in the US.

December 22, 2010

Is Facebook Still Good to Market Your Business?

This is a question I’ve been asked a lot lately.

With the new changes on Facebook, despite its huge audience is it still a good tool for business owners? Let’s take a look…

With the new layout of the fan pages, tabs go away and you cannot land new people on a specific page where you ask them to like your page. The already challenging task of making them engage with a fan page increases here.

When you ask friends to like your page, the request does not show anymore below friend requests. You need to find it under requests on the right side of your feed. Do you remember to check that?

Add that to the fact that now you need to periodically check if there are messages that were qualified as spam on your wall and release them.

Events now have their own button and don’t show anymore below your friend requests. Do you click on events button? One more thing to do every day if you are a networker and if you are not, why click? If you rely on Facebook to fill seats, bring people to meetings, teleseminars etc, it just became more complicated. It was not very good before either because people would just click attend with no intention of really attending but now there is one more hoop to go over.

Even the pay-per-click ads on Facebook generate leads but very few buyers, and we have tested this in several industries.

Don’t forget the fact that you must interact with people on your profile and pages as much as you can because if you don’t your feed will stop showing on their wall. Facebook has an algorithm that checks who you are most likely to be really friends with and selects for you who sees your messages. If you are more of a listener type, you might have about 8 people showing on your feed and vice-versa.

So, is it worth to spend time marketing on Facebook?

If you don’t have a strong presence online, you are just starting a new business, need to have more visibility and create awareness, Facebook can be really good to you. If you figure how to get attention with the visibility you get there and do something different than every one else is doing. When you open your feed you probably see everybody giving tips. What are you going to do that is different?

If you want to brand your company, have a budget to spend on apps, contests etc. Facebook is a good option. You can use it as a broadcast channel to broadcast your voice, podcasts etc. We have deepened relationships with clients and prospects, got quite a few interviews and speaking gigs from Facebook too.

Branding, visibility, awareness are the biggest benefits Facebook can give you when marketing your business there. Don’t expect to build a business just with Facebook but don’t discard it as part of your marketing mix.