social media | Aqua Vita

3.04.2010
Marketing Alchemy

How To Use Social Media Management Tools – 5 Tips

Published by Jessica Cox under Marketing Alchemy

Twitter eating up your time? Facebook filling up your schedule? Losing track of time on LinkedIn? You’re not alone. Time management is one of the top challenges for serious online networkers.

Social media management is worth the effort. Networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace can launch your message to the far corners of the net. You can harness this power for your business.

But managing these social networks doesn’t have to consume your day. Here are five tools to take back your day and streamline your social media circle.

Social Media Management Tool: HootSuite

Schedule a week’s worth of tweets and status updates in under ten minutes? It can be done! HootSuite schedules tweets for later publication on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Ping.fm. This is my personal favorite web application for handling social media.

Plus, with a careful Ping.fm setup, you can achieve social media nirvana, scheduling updates on Plaxo, MySpace, LiveJournal, and more. Truly mind-blowing.

You can keep an eye on your Facebook and LinkedIn social media networks here as well, with separate columns for various Twitter list feeds. Their reputation management settings allow for social media monitoring on your key terms. Clever.

They make it easy to use, too! There’s an iPhone App, and a quick-post button for scheduling updates while you browse.

Bonus 1: HootSuite gives you automatic link shrinkage and tracking!

Bonus 2: The adorable mascot. Look at those big eyes!

Bonus 3: It handles pages and personal accounts separately. Yes!

Social Media Management Tool: TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an application that lives on your computer, organizing the stream-of-consciousness into customized columns. It plays well with Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, and Twitter, and handles custom searches, @replies, and direct messages.

Bonus 1: TweetDeck is also on iPhone.

Bonus 2: It handles multiple accounts with the greatest of ease.

Bonus 3: It’s a multimedia star: drag and drop images into TweetDeck to share on Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. You can record and share YouTube videos within TweetDeck also.

Bonus 4: Interactive notifications.

Social Media Tip: Import Your Blog to Facebook

This one is a huge time-saver. Facebook has a built-in tool to import posts from an external blog! The posts show up as notes, without you lifting a finger. Facebook will automatically update your notes whenever you write in your blog.

With this setting, you can import posts from Blogger, WordPress, or any other blogging platform with an RSS feed. Choose wisely: you can only import one blog.

Bummer: Imported blog posts cannot be edited.

Social Media Tool: Posterous

From one email, create dozens of blogs and social updates. Send blogs, pictures, and status updates to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and blogs.

This service spins all forms of multimedia into web-friendly formats. Bring them your photos, audio files and links, documents, video files and links. They will even resize photos to web-friendly size.

Bonus 1: Posterous redefines “easy to use”. Attach multimedia file to email. Send to post@posterous.com. Poof! Blog post.

Bonus 2: Posterous also offers a social media bookmarklet, for your browsing convenience.

Social Media Tool: Ping.fm

Post blogs, miniblogs, and status updates to over 40 social networks. From the popular to the obscure, this is one of the most complete network support for social media posting services. Unfortunately, multiple Twitter accounts are a bit tough.

For customized communications, you can create “posting groups” to focus messages. Your “professional” group might hook into LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo. On the other hand, the “Personal” group could send information to Blogger, Friendster, and so on.

Bonus 1: Ning support, very impressive.

Bonus 2: iPhone integration. Of course.

Bonus 3: Social bookmarking support.

Social Media Tip: Tools do not replace interaction

Imagine sending a robot to replace you at in-person networking events. Not the best impression to leave with your audience, right? In the same way, overusing social media tools can leave your network cold and disinterested. It can be tempting to take things to the limit with automation. But remember, there’s no substitute for the “personal touch” in networking, online or offline.

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2.02.2010
Marketing Alchemy

Get the Facts on Facebook: 22 Tips & Statistics

Published by Jessica Cox under Marketing Alchemy

Facebook has become a powerhouse platform for businesses looking to connect with their customers and prospects online. With over 350 million users interacting online, it’s easy to see the appeal of getting face time on this popular social network.

Facebook user statistics:

Facebook claims more than 350 million active users.
Fifty percent of active users log on to Facebook in any given day.
The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook.

That’s a lot of people spending quite a bit of time in one place online. Do you have a stake in that game?

What about Facebook for businesses?

More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
There are more than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook.
Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans.

If your target market is spending time on Facebook, you should start thinking about how to reach them.

Think tribal:

“Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends… You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can’t effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician’s glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity’s empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed.”
– Seth Godin

Who are your 150 people? Who are the influencers you REALLY need to pay attention to?

This is important because you can’t be all things to all people. You can’t reach everyone intimately. You probably don’t want to. But you can be relevant, engaging, and useful to a small group of people. Get some traction going there and build momentum.

Facebook friend stats:

Average user has 130 friends on the site
Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
Average user is a member of 12 groups

Eternal welcome mode:

“Every day, new people show up at your blog, on Facebook, everywhere.”
– Seth Godin

Thousands of people are still learning the ropes of social media and Facebook. And even if they’ve been around the block a time or two, they may still be new to your blog, your Facebook page, or your Twitter feed.

Make it easy for new users to interact with you. Lay out the welcome mat and show them around. Help them get to know you. Be sure to integrate your social profiles on your website and in your email campaigns, and use every opportunity to invite people to follow you.

Facebook stats:

Average user becomes a fan of 2 pages each month
Average user is invited to 3 events per month

It’s all about interaction:

“Now Facebook mostly displays items that got engagement. You know, comments. Likes. Tagging. Etc. …you only see the items that your friends have found important enough to comment on or ‘touch’ in some way.

“Overnight my news feed went from something that looked pretty cold and lame to something that has tons of ‘warmth.’”
- Robert Scoble

Social media users delight in connection, interaction, sharing. Your goals should be to stimulate conversations, comments, and life on your pages. Because if your content is worthy of comment, you could be showing up on radar screens for not only your fans, but their friends as well. Look for ways to create these opportunities, and keep the conversation rolling when they happen.

Facebook Interaction Stats:

Average Facebook user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month.
Average Facebook user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month.

Create worthy contributions:

“One of the keys to success in building a fan base with your Facebook efforts is to consistently add great content and engagement.”
- Robert Scoble

More than 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared each week on Facebook. What are you contributing? Links, articles, blogs, how-to’s, news, profiles, photos, podcasts, videos: you can find a hundred different ways to dazzle your audience on Facebook. What are their burning questions? What is it they truly desire? Is anything confusing or worrying them?

You can be the voice they turn to for guidance, hope, inspiration, or a good laugh. Above all you must be worthy of their time and attention.

Facebook content creation stats:

More than 35 million users update their status each day
More than 55 million status updates posted each day
More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 3.5 million events created each month

Deliver the goods:

“Social media only accelerates the inevitable”
- Bryan Eisenberg

Social media can form connections with clients and prospects. After that, it’s up to you to keep them satisfied, and build long-lasting relationships. The best social media campaign in the world won’t make up for bad service. But engaging your customers and prospects online can open the door for them to do business with you.

1.05.2010
Naked Writing

Four Unbreakable Social Media Rules

Published by Michelle Pierce under Naked Writing

1. Thou shalt be active.

In social media, you have to establish yourself as part of the community. Don’t just set up an account, make a couple of status updates or send a couple of tweets, and then decide that it’s not working. Social media marketing is not a magic bullet (nothing is). It takes time, and the most popular people online have been doing it for years.

Look at it as an investment. You’re investing in a community that will give you more informal access to your customers, to their hopes and dreams and disappointments. You can find out what they love and what they hate about you. It is easier than EVER to get feedback from people on how you’re doing, so that you can make your company into everything that your ideal customer would want.

Once you’re doing that, you can transform casual customers into hardcore fans. And hardcore fans are the ones who pimp you out to everybody they know.

2. Thou shalt be transparent—but not too transparent.

If you’re balancing work and personal stuff on sites like Twitter and Facebook, go for the 80/20 rule: 80 percent professional, 20 percent personal. That’s just enough to make people feel like they “know” you without giving up a ton of your privacy. And remember: people are more likely to buy from people they know than from people they don’t know.

Also, unless you’re plugging the awesome deli on the corner where you just had lunch, nobody cares about what kind of sandwich you’re eating. Even your personal posts need to have some guidelines.

3. Thou shalt not worry about making somebody angry.

Participating in any kind of back-and-forth with dozens—or hundreds—of anonymous people will eventually result in somebody getting ticked off. People don’t agree on everything. Heck, I can’t even get three people to agree on a radio station in my car. Just accept that sometimes, especially when you’re expressing an opinion, somebody’s going to take offense.

The only way to stop it is to make everything you write so utterly bland and flavorless that nobody would read it long enough to agree with you. And in social media, that’s more often worse than making people angry.

I’m not saying that you need to be deliberately antagonistic when you’re writing a post, or a Twitter update, or a bulletin. Just don’t completely neuter your point of view.

4. Thou shalt not post when angry.

And when somebody does get angry, as we discussed above, remember this rule. Never post when you’re angry. Don’t comment, don’t send an email, don’t interact with anybody. It’s so easy to spout off online when you’re angry, and engaging in a flame war will have very real, detrimental effects to both you and your business if you’re not careful.

Take some time to cool off before you post. Step away from the computer. Take a walk. Get some other work done. Eat some chocolate. Just make sure that you have to have control of yourself before you sit back down at the keyboard.

The thing to remember about the online world is that nobody has the benefit of hearing the tone or seeing the body language behind the words, and everything you do reflects on your company. Everything.

A poor reaction could cost you business. However, if you handle negative posts properly, you’ll earn a lot of esteem and respect in your community for doing so.

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Picture by dullhunk

12.18.2009
Marketing Alchemy

Social Media Showdown: Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Email

Published by Jessica Cox under Marketing Alchemy

E-mail continues to dominate emerging social channels such as Twitter and Facebook. E-mail remains the favorite way to share information with colleagues and friends, according to the latest social media study by ShareThis, a popular social content sharing widget.

Shared content breakdown:

Email: 46%
Facebook: 33%
Twitter: 6%

The remaining 14.4 percent split out between various other platforms like Digg, del.icio.us, and LinkedIn.

Also interesting: how people used the content after it was shared. Twitter came out on top for interaction: their links drew the most click-throughs. Maybe the shiny new retweet button is working its magic.

Click-throughs:

Twitter: 40%
E-mail: 35%
Facebook: 25%

However, the high-speed Twitter visitors ricocheted off the page in short order: Twitter visitors looked at 1.66 pages before exiting. Email on the other hand, delivered much more steady engagement at 2.95 pages.

Engagement:

Email: 2.95 pages
Facebook: 2.76 pages
Twitter: 1.66 pages

Twitter & Email: Speed vs. Depth

Thus far, Twitter is the fastest of the social mediums, much like telegraph or ticker tape messages. Users can access information at the speed of light, and let it go just as quickly.

With speed comes impermanence. This makes Twitter the “quick fix” medium with the least staying power for messages. Once a tweet appears, it can float away in an instant, or get a boost on wave after wave of retweets. Twitter visitors click the links, and click back just as quickly.

It’s interesting to see how the virtual opening of Twitter borders with new technology integration will affect the development of the system and expand this ripple effect.

Takeaway:
While Twitter usage has soared, email is still the top social media sharing mechanism. Integrated campaigns will have deeper, more lasting effects.

At 40 percent, Twitter seems to have the highest “click-it!” factor. The fast pace encourages you to click links before they sail out into the global stream of consciousness. However, the numbers show email still has much more popular acceptance, and email visitors tend to stay longer.

“Of course this varies by vertical and site, but if you think about your own habits, it makes sense. Getting an emailed link from a friend may cause you to pay more attention than the more random discovery that you get on Twitter as you consume quick opinions.” – Tim Schigel (@schigel)

Playing to the strengths of both mediums

Some people also argue that a “closed system” like Twitter or Facebook can never hope to replace or approach an “open system” like email as a universal communication medium. Personally, I don’t think it’s a question of replacing; both mediums have their functions.

Twitter offers a different scope of information and multimedia than email. You have to consider the amount of data you can communicate in 140 characters. Enough to intrigue, not enough to educate or persuade. On the other hand, you can’t beat Twitter for immediate message gratification.

With email, you can get more creative with multimedia and use HTML templates and engagement tracking. You can deliver a more complex message, offer more options for interaction, and create a more complete experience. Email also provides the comforting idea you can save something to read later. It’s very easy to organize and archive information. Facebook falls somewhere in between.

Your thoughts?

It’s a safe bet that the capabilities of both platforms will continue to evolve and entwine. Your thoughts? Where are email, Twitter, and Facebook headed?

10.28.2009
Marketing Alchemy

Google Launches Social Search

Published by Jessica Cox under Marketing Alchemy

After signing a deal with Twitter last week to display Tweets in search results, Google launched another surprise experiment in Google Labs: Social Search.

It’s long been said that success in business depends on who you know. Now, success on the search engine results pages will also depend on who you know, now that Google has launched its Social Search product into its experimental Google Labs.
- Kevin Newcomb at ClickZ reports

As Google VP Marisa Mayer explained at the Web 2.0 Summit, the Social Search highlights content created by friends of the searcher, or content from sites that the user follows via RSS feed. Social Search will put more weight on a user’s social graph when determining what results are relevant.

Our objective is to bring content authored or endorsed by your social circle right to your Google search results.
- Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Social Search results will reference content created by the user’s Google contacts, (Gmail, Google Talk, etc.), including Friendfeed and Twitter accounts linked in the user’s Google Profile. RSS feeds linked in Google Reader, and sites linked in a user’s Google Profile will also weigh heavily in Social Search results.

Those results will appear in a separate section at the bottom of the search results page, at least for now, Singhal said. Google will return blog posts, Twitter and FriendFeed entries, or other content created by the searcher’s social connections, or from blogs the searcher has subscribed to in Google Reader, under the heading “Results from people in your social circle,” as depicted below.

Singhal emphasized that all content included in these results is already publicly available to anyone, so nothing the creator hasn’t already shared publicly will be revealed. Facebook might be on the outs for this deal, since much of their content is viewable only to friends.

So what does it all mean?

My take: Brilliant move to blur the line between search and social media. Google is tailoring Google profiles as a social hub, leveraging their search algorithms to pull relevant data from a user’s social media network.

Marketers and SEO buffs take note. Google is considering social media networks to determine relevancy for search results. As major search engines begin to weigh social media relevancy, you can expect to see companies focus intently on building these crucial connections.