All posts in social media

This post originally appeared on State of Search.

Given that engaging on the social web can benefit your brand’s marketing, recruitment, PR, sales, customer service, and other departments, the question of ‘who should manage and represent your brand on the social web?’ will inevitably arise. The answer is, all of them.

I believe that all employees with a passion and interest in representing the brand should be encouraged to. Utilising the expertise and networks of the people within your business is incredibly valuable when it comes to engaging on the social web and is not something that can be easily outsourced.

It sounds obvious, but many businesses give a variety of social media responsibilities to the PR team, the tech team or external agencies, which is fine, but social media is not about using tools, it’s about extending your current business activities into the landscape of social media to identify opportunities. It should therefore ideally be the responsibility of the people within the business, assisted by those with experience in recommending tools and strategies to increase effectiveness and productivity.

Launching a social network is to some extent a bit of a chicken and egg scenario these days, as you need people to encourage the businesses to get involved, but businesses can also attract more people.

This morning Google launched the metaphorical egg in their social network chicken and egg scenario – they launched ‘Google+ Pages’ as a means for businesses to join Google+. The question now is:  if businesses join Google+, will it encourage more people to join and utilise the network?

Those of you who follow my tweets will probably know that I’ve recently launched a book called Get Noticed, which is a guide that explores the processes and techniques that successful networkers use to get noticed.

In the course of writing the book I carried out a lot of research around how people meet and what it takes to develop a strong relationship, which has had a tremendous impact on my understanding of successful blogger outreach. On Wednesday morning I sent out 100 e-mails to YouTube video bloggers and so far I’ve received 77 replies (not bad when most sources suggest anywhere from 3% to 25% is a good response rate for an outreach campaign).

In this post I want to share a few tips and tricks I’ve learnt about outreach from researching, writing and marketing Get Noticed to help you improve the success of your outreach campaigns.

Image Credit: ekai

I’m going to assume that you’ve already done some blogger outreach and know the basics like finding the right bloggers to target, personalising your e-mails, sending them at the right time and including obvious call-to-actions. This one’s for the pros

In this day and age, it’s probably fair to say that we’re all aware of the value of Twitter – both on an interpersonal level and in a business context – so I’ll spare you the “why everyone should be on Twitter” blurb. Those ‘in the know’ will know that following the right people is important in terms of reaching out to an appropriate audience – those it will benefit you to interact with and who will share your tweets with their followers. As you build up your Twitter followers, you’ve probably done a fair bit of work to follow people who appear to share your interests. But in the process, you’ve probably ended up following a load of Twitter users who add little or no value to your Twitter experience, and I’ve discovered a great tool to help you weed them out.

Twit Cleaner assesses the list of people you follow and categorises the ones who aren’t adding much value according to a range of different annoying behaviour, including posting nothing but links, posting the same tweet several times, never interacting with anyone else and only tweeting about themselves.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been surprised to see some really great posts struggle to gain any momentum, as well as seeing some really crap posts do surprisingly well in terms of being shared by a large audience. My suspicion is that in both cases it had a lot to do with the design of the sites that the blog posts were hosted on (here’s a very good post on how design impacts shareability). I thought it would be interesting to put this question to the community to see what people thought were the most important factors in assisting a blog post to go viral and to see how important design really is. I’d love to hear as many people’s opinions as possible on the topic, especially around design impacting shareability. What do you think?

For those of you who missed the Livestream of yesterday’s F8 Facebook Conference, CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced some major changes to the future of Facebook, which in a nutshell is to try and realise his vision of making the whole web social. Within Facebook, the focus is shifting from ‘what you say’ to ‘what you do’. Here are some of the major changes announced:

1. Facebook Profiles Are Replaced With ‘Timelines’
Facebook claimed that Facebook is no longer going to show ’15 minutes of your story’ but instead a timeline of your life. Here is a snapshot of the new Facebook Timeline design.

When social media marketers ran Facebook campaigns that were aimed at driving traffic toward their websites, they had to resort to tools such as Google Analytics in order to measure success or failure of their Facebook campaigns. However, a nifty new addition to the Facebook arsenal is the ‘insights for domains’ feature which has been introduced with minimum fanfare by Facebook. I strongly believe that if you run Facebook campaigns for your website then this is a ‘must have’ tool in order to monitor and optimise your Facebook content consumption.

We tested it out on our website for a couple of months and the information we have been able to gather has not only been extremely insightful, but also helped make better decisions regarding social media marketing strategies and tactics when running Facebook campaigns. This is indeed a phenomenal development, and one that we thought should be elaborated.

Getting started

In order to set up insights for websites, you will need to associate your website with a Facebook page or app that you manage. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click on the green button that reads “insights for your website”.

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Recently there has been much talk about Klout. You could call it a swelling hype. Usually a new service goes all out to get noticed but Klout has been around for quite a while. Over time the service which attempts to identify and classify influencers on social media has gained considerable influence itself.

There are already lots of lists with Klout score optimisation techniques.

Some remind me of old school SEO. Indeed, some people propagate short cuts to boost your Klout influence artificially.

While many people rightfully contest the true importance of the Klout score, it’s still one of the best ways to measure influence on the Web without resorting to simplistic metrics such as followers counts. Klout also combines several profiles into one metric. You can connect your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts among others, so that you get an overview of your overall authority or activity.

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The Google+ honeymoon might be over but many people are still active on the site. As Google+ has some shortcomings, lacking features and usability flaws, there are now numerous tools to deal with these issues. I’ve compiled a list of the most promising ones.

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Initially Google+ was the darling of most media pundits. It was shiny, new and it grew like no other social network before. It was a typical infatuation with a new hype. Now that most Internet power users have already joined and been trying Google+ for a while the honeymoon seems to be over.

Several issues have marred the rise of the new Google social network.

Most of the issues are home grown. The dynamics of a top down social media launch, where the tech celebrities and social media mavens get the invitations first, can scare off the average user. However, these people are the backbone of Facebook’s success.

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