Social Media 101 Archives - Page 4 of 5

March 17, 2011 by Mack Collier

A no-nonsense guide to sharing and promoting content on Twitter

I’m coming up on my 4th anniversary of being on Twitter. The way I have used Twitter has changed at least a dozen times, and I am constantly experimenting with how to use the site to best meet my goals. Here’s some tips I have learned for how I share and promote content on Twitter:

1 – Think about who you are trying to connect with. Once you figure out who you are trying to reach, then you’ll have a much better idea of what type of content they need. And if you can share valuable content with these people, that will improve the chances of them following you, and then promoting you to their networks.

2 – Promote ‘helpful’ content as much as possible. Share content that educates, that solves problems. A lot of my content is based around 101 and 102 level social media how-tos and instructional articles and posts. Because ultimately, I want to reach companies that need help with using social media to connect with their customers. So sharing helpful content helps me connect with these people, and it increases the chance that someone will mention me if they are in contact with a company that does need help.

3 – Sharing other people’s content increases interest in your own. I actually tracked this and saw the results on this site. When I share more content from other people, it drives traffic back here. Why? Because sharing useful content introduces me to new people, who want to check out who I am, and my site.

4 – Promote the hell out of smart people. Seriously, when you find someone that’s smart, you cannot promote their content enough. This is why I promote almost every post that Beth, Lisa or Shannon writes. I know that they always create valuable and helpful content that will be appreciated by my network. That is always my main goal, give my network valuable content.

5 – Don’t share content to get on someone’s radar, share content because it’s amazing. In many ways, you are known by the content you share. So go for amazing content, it matters not who created it.

6 – Wrap as much amazing shared content around YOUR content as possible. Want to share your newest blog post on Twitter? Fine, but it will get more exposure and traffic if you also share 10 posts from other writers that same day. I’ve tested this as well, whenever I share other people’s content and mix MY post in with their posts, I get far more traffic.

7 – YOU have to make your own list. This is my list. Make your own. And you can use this list as your starting point, but you have to tweak and tinker and experiment to find a system that works for YOU. This works for me, it might work well for you as well, or maybe you need to make wholesale changes.

Speaking of which, what is your best tip for sharing content on Twitter?

March 4, 2011 by Mack Collier

My SXSW schedule

This time next week, my plane will (hopefully) just be landing in Austin. I’ve never been this excited about attending SXSW and I have a ton of events I’ll be attending, so I wanted to list everything here, so hopefully we can connect. I’ll be at SXSW from next Friday through Monday afternoon. The majority of my time on Friday and Monday during the day will be devoted to meetings, and I’ll be in the Austin Convention Center for the most part.

If you are a company (Especially big brand B2C) that:

Needs Social Media Training
Needs Social Media Consulting or Advisement
Needs help launching a brand ambassador or blogger/influencer outreach program
Want to discuss sponsoring a future #Blogchat or sponsoring a LIVE #Blogchat event

Then please email me and let’s set up a time to discuss your needs. I’ve already got some meetings scheduled during Friday and Monday, but if you want to discuss how we can work together, I’ll make sure we get a chance to connect.

As for Saturday and Sunday (and Friday night), I am going to spend those days connecting with my old and new friends. Here’s the events I will be at:

Friday Night: Ignite Social Media Party, starting at 7pm.

Saturday: Tequila Now party for the Now Revolution from 1:30 – 3:30pm.

Saturday Night: Either Wiley book party, or Frog Design’s Opening Party (which would be better?)

Sunday: #AllHat3 from 12:30 – 3:00pm

Sunday: #Blogchat LIVE at SXSW from 3:30-6:00pm (YES!)

Sunday Night: #Blogchat on Twitter from 7pm-9:30pm (probably from the Hilton lobby ;))

So if we haven’t met let’s please do so at SXSW! Feel free to email me and we can get together and I can shake your hand, at least 😉

March 3, 2011 by Mack Collier

40 Dead Simple Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog

Want more engagement and interaction on your blog? Yeah, most of us do, here’s 40 tips to get you started:

Blog Design:

1 – Put your picture on the front page and the About page of the blog.

2 – On the About page write who you are and why you are blogging. Both #1 and #2 make it easier for readers to connect with you, which makes them more likely to interact with you.

3 – Highlight commenters. Remember to always reward the action that you want to encourage.

4 – Use the Comment Luv plugin on your self-hosted WordPress blog. Again, when someone comments, they get an extra link, which encourages more comments.

5 – Add a form to subscribe to your blog via email.

6 – Add Feed/RSS subscriber buttons to your blog.

7 – Add a link to contact you directly, by email at least. Or add a Contact Me page. Remember, not everyone is comfortable commenting on your blog, they may want to use email. Getting an email exchange going can convince them to start commenting.

8 – Create a blogroll or ‘Favorite Reads’ page highlighting your favorite blogs and add blogs from your regular contributors.

9 – Write a comment policy. Tell your readers exactly what is expected of them when they comment.

10 – Don’t moderate comments. Nothing about the words ‘Your comment is awaiting moderation’ encourages a reader to comment more. Nothing.

11 – If you do moderate, approve comments as quickly as possible.

Writing posts:

12 – Take a definite stand. Tackle a heated issue and firmly state your opinion/beliefs. Notice how Beth Harte did that in this post on Social Media ROI. Notice how some commenters are agreeing with her, and how some are disagreeing. But by taking a stand, she got a conversation started.

13 – Close your post with ‘What do you think?’ Possibly the 4 words that get more interaction than any other. Chris Brogan often ends his posts with ‘Your Turn’.

14 – Link to other bloggers that are creating valuable content. Notice this post has 5 links to other bloggers. Those links will help my readers find valuable content, and it also increases the chances that my readers as well as the writers I linked to, will comment here.

15 – Be personal. Lisa Petrilli probably does this better than anyone, and note that her readers respond in kind. It makes it much easier to share your personal thoughts when someone else does first.

16 – Get on a regular posting schedule. We talked about this yesterday.

17 – Write in a conversational tone. This is tricky, but what I try to do is write a post as if I am saying what I think first, and then I know you are going to make your point in the comments, and then we’ll continue the discussion there. But in general, think of writing a blog post as if you are writing a letter to someone, not a memo.

18 – Write posts based on comments your readers have left. Did Jackie leave an amazing comment on your last post? Did it spark you to write a long comment? Why not take that long comment and turn it into a new post. Then reference Jackie’s comment, and link to her blog as well. Remember, reward the behavior that you want to encourage.

19 – Add great comments to your post. If you don’t want to do the above, then you can add a comment to the end of your post. Add an UPDATE at the end, mention the comment and person who left it (with a link to their blog). This ALSO encourages everyone to read the comments, since you just alerted them to the fact that there’s some serious smartitude happening there.

20 – Write about breaking news. Especially controversial news, my recent posts on Groupon’s Super Bowl ads and the Kenneth Cole Twitter PR snafu got a lot of interaction, because I wrote about them right after they happened. If I wrote about either topics today, there would likely be MUCH less interest.

21 – Write passionately. Don’t sell me your ideas, tell me why they are going to change the world. Make me understand why you are so passionate about your ideas, and that increases the chance that I will get excited about them, and want to respond.

22 – Encourage readers to promote themselves and share more about what they are doing. Becky McCray’s Brag Basket is a wonderful example of this.

Responding to comments:

23 – Refer to your commenters by their first name. Remember when I said to write in a conversational tone? This is a perfect extension of that. Notice how the HomeGoods bloggers do this at the Open House blog? Looks like they are writing letters, not comments, doesn’t it?

24 – Respond to comments. Back to Lisa Petrilli’s blog, she usually has double-digit comments on every post, and she’s responsible for about half the comments on her blog. See the connection?

25 – Say thank you. Seriously, common courtesy isn’t as common as it should be.

26 – Ask a commenter to elaborate on a point. If Tom makes a good point but you want to hear more about his reasoning, ask him to expand on his thoughts.

27 – Leave comments on other blogs. The best way to grow your blog, is to leave it.

28 – Leave comments on the blogs of your commenters. Again, you want to reward the behavior you are trying to encourage.

Other Social Media Sites:

29 – Promote great comments AND the commenter on other sites. Often I will tweet a link on Twitter to my latest post, but will link to the actual comment that someone left. And if I know what their Twitter name is, I will link to it as well. Such as ‘Love the comment that @SWoodruff left on my post about building a blogging team’. That way Steve gets acknowledged as well.

30 – Participate in discussions on other sites. I have left a ton of comments on blogs after ‘meeting’ that blogger at #Blogchat.

31 – Promote other people. All this does is encourage more people to check out your site, and comment.

But Mack, you promised us 40 tips, where are the other 9?!?

You have to figure out the other 9 for yourself. Actually, after you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll discover a few dozen more tips (at least) besides these for getting more comments and interaction on your blog. These ‘tips’ and ‘How-to’ posts are always popular because people want to direction. They want to know what the ‘rules’ are.

But if you want to be a truly great blogger, here’s the best rule to follow: Make your own rules. Don’t look at the above as being the ONLY 31 tips that exist for getting more comments. Look at it as 31 tips to get you STARTED. Figure out how to add to this list, then share what you’ve learned, so it becomes your 50 tips for getting more comments.

What works for you that I didn’t list? Help us find the 9 missing tips 😉

UPDATE: Aaron reminded me of a great way to encourage comments: Thank 1st-time commenters with a custom page. I use this plugin so that the 1st time you leave a comment here, you are taken to a special page that thanks you for commenting!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jonathan left this fabulous tip in the comments for leveraging Facebook to get more comments on your blog: “One tip that I have found helpful is to get a discussion going on our Facebook page telling my readers that I am writing a post on it. I include their comments to the discussion in my post and then share the link to the post in the original Facebook comment thread. It really has helped me build our community.”

March 2, 2011 by Mack Collier

How to create a posting schedule for your business blog

If you are wanting to build traffic, interest and awareness for your business blog, one of the biggest factors is posting regular content to that blog. When I say ‘regular’, I mean that you have a schedule for how often you post to your blog. If you can only post once a month, then you post a new post every single month. If you can post once a week, then every Wednesday, you have a new post up.

So here’s some quick tips for creating a posting schedule for your business blog:

1 – Figure out how often you can post to the blog, and shoot for a minimum of once a week. And give yourself a range, and go with the low end. It’s better to commit to one new post a week and then bump that up to 2 posts a week, than it is to start out posting twice a week, then have to back that down to once a week.

2 – Post on the same days every week. Not everyone subscribes to blogs, and the ones that don’t will want to know when they can expect new content on your blog. If they know for sure that every Wednesday means a new post on your company blog, then that greatly increases the chances that they will visit on Wednesday.

3 – Organize posts by content. This is a great way to get more posts on your blog. For example, if you are subscribed to industry sites and blogs, collect the interesting news and articles you find throughout the week, then on every Friday, write a post sharing 3-5 links, and write a brief summary of why the article is important. Not only does this give your blog an extra post, but by sharing links with your readers, you are helping to keep them informed, which has real value for them. If you only publish one new post a week to your blog then start doing this, you’ve instantly doubled the new content you create on your blog.

What would this look like in practice? Here’s an example with a company that has a 3-person team creating content for their blog:

Monday: Jessica writes a thought leadership article designed to help establish the company’s expertise.

Wednesday: Laura writes a post answering a reader-submitted question.

Friday: Kevin writes a post sharing links to industry news.

By following this simple posting strategy, the company has found a way to create content that builds its brand awareness, helps it better connect with its customers and improve satisfaction, plus draw new readers.

If you are part of a blogging team for your company, how did your team create its posting schedule? What did I miss?

February 22, 2011 by Mack Collier

Social Media Crisis Management: A No-Nonsense Guide

Past Social Media dramas involving The Red Cross, Groupon and Kenneth Cole are good reminders of the importance of having a solid social media crisis management plan in place. At its very basic level, the proper handling of a social media crisis should consist of two thing:

1 – A quick response

2 – A proper response

Let’s look at both areas:

Responding quickly to a social media crisis

If you look back at many of the social media dramas that have played out for companies over the past couple of years, many of them were exacerbated by a slow response from the company or organization. The delay in responding meant the people that were upset had more time to voice their displeasure with the company, to other people. Which raised awareness of the problem, and made it far worse. The Motrin Moms episode could have likely been defused very quickly, if Motrin and its agency had been proactive in responding to complaints on Twitter about one of its commercials. But since the crisis occurred on the weekend, when the brand and agency weren’t monitoring Twitter, it was allowed to grow and fester. By Sunday, most people were complaining more about Motrin’s lack of a response, than they were the commercial itself.

So you can’t respond quickly, unless you know what you are responding to. That means you need to aggressively monitor your brand’s online mentions. There’s no excuse for any company that conducts business online, to not monitor online mentions. Even if you are a small company with a limited budget, there are still free tools you can use to monitor social media. If you are a mid-sized to larger company, you should seriously consider investing in a premium monitoring suite that will track not only mentions, but trends and sentiment as well. But the point is to know what is being said online about your company or organization. Remember, when did Noah build the Ark? Before the rains came, not after.

So now that you are monitoring online mentions, then you can see what is being said about your brand in (more or less) real-time. This also means that when a situation arises that needs to be addressed, that you can quickly mobilize and formulate a response. We’ll talk more about the tone of your response in a second, but another key benefit of monitoring is that it tells you WHERE you need to respond. If there is a potential crisis developing on Twitter, then that’s where you need to respond. If it’s on a single message board or forum, then you need to find a way to respond there. The point is, you need to go to the source of the complaints, and interact with people there.

Responding properly to a social media crisis

So if you have identified a potential issue that you need to address, how should you respond? Here are 4 common sense tips for handling complaints or negative online feedback:

1 – If someone is leaving negative comments about your company, respond. Even if they are intentionally attacking your company (or ‘trolling’), then invite them to please contact you directly so you can help them with their issues. And remember, if someone is leaving comments that personally attack your employees or customers, or that contain profanity or inflammatory language, you should delete them. Now if they are simply saying that they think your company sucks, deleting these type of comments will tend to draw more of the same. People can see when someone has crossed the line with the tone of their comments, and they won’t fault a blogging company for deleting comments in this case.

2 – Be thankful and polite. Nothing escalates a negative comment into a full-bore flamewar faster than an ‘Oh yeah?!?’ reply from the company. You have to always remember that the person commenting thinks their complaint is warranted. And many times, they are right.

3 – If you are in the wrong, then apologize. And mean it. The two most magical words in putting out a social media crisis are ‘We’re sorry’.

4 – If commenters are jumping to the wrong conclusion about your company, kindly correct them with the proper information. Just as you don’t have to accept profanity or attacking comments on your blog, you shouldn’t feel that you have to accept if a blogger or commenter is posting inaccurate information on another site. But again, remember to correct the misinformation with a respectful tone.

5 – Thank them for their feedback, and encourage them to provide more. Leave your email address so they can contact you off the blog, if they choose. This communicates to everyone that you WANT engagement and want to communicate with them.

Now for the elephant in the room

Even if you respond quickly and appropriately, you still have to fix the problem. People are upset for a reason, and you still need to address that reason, and correct the problem. It might not be a quick fix, but you need to let people know how you are handling the issue, and what steps will be taken to correct the problem. This is where you can use your social media presences such a blog or Facebook page to communicate to customers and supporters what your plan is for handling the crisis. But you need to have a plan, you need to communicate that plan (not every detail, obviously), then you need to execute it.

Does this help? Also, to get another real-world example of social media crisis management, check out this video from @GaryVee on how he handled a social media crisis he found himself in.

February 1, 2011 by Mack Collier

3 Reasons Why Social Media Training is Critical for Companies in 2011

The above is a graph from EMarketer listing the top areas that corporate social media strategists will be investing in 2011. Note that the most important investment area for these strategists, behind only measuring SM ROI, was internal education and training. I think there are 3 reasons why social media training is so critical for companies, especially larger ones, in 2011.

1 – Social media for companies has evolved, teams are now in place. Larger companies are no longer experimenting with social media, they’ve now committed and staffs have been hired. It’s very important for companies to invest in training these teams and not only that, but that they get the same training. And that open interaction and collaboration is facilitated. In many cases, the people that spearheaded a company’s social media efforts a couple of years ago, are now training all areas of the company on using these same tools.

2 – Social media training is cost-efficient. I’ve seen this far too often over the past 2-3 years. A company sends an employee to a social media conference, then that person takes copious notes all day in every session, then goes back to her office and tries to explain to her team what she learned. So the end result is the company paid $1,500-$2,000 to send one person to a conference, and all they get is a notepad full of hastily scribbled notes that no one can really explain.

This is exactly why last year I shifted the focus of my consulting to providing on-site social media training for companies. I realized that for about the same amount that a company could send an employee or 2 to a social media conference, I could give them on-site social media training for an entire day, to their entire team. This is a huge cost-savings to the company, and helps the entire team be more efficient in its social media efforts, meaning the investment in social media training easily pays for itself several times over. Please check out my Social Media Training and Workshops page to see exactly how this service works.

3 – Social media training helps get everyone on the same page. Instead of having ‘the blogging guy’ and ‘the Facebook gal’, your entire team can be up to speed on how your company is using these tools, and more importantly, what you are trying to accomplish. That means that the efforts of the individuals will be more effective, and as a result, the output of the entire team will increase dramatically.

So if your company now has an organized social media team, there’s three reasons why I think it’s critical for you to invest in social media training in 2011. If your company has started a social media training program, either internally, or by bringing in external consultants or agencies, how has that worked for you?

And if your company would like to hire me to either provide on-site social media training to your team, and/or to help your company organize an internal social media training program for your employees, please email me.

January 20, 2011 by Mack Collier

How to Fix a Broken Social Media Strategy

Let’s say three months ago you convinced your boss to let you put up a page for the business on Facebook. Then a couple of weeks later, the boss gave you the go-ahead on spending a few minutes a day on Twitter.

But that was three months ago. And you’ve been spending more and more time on Facebook and Twitter, and the boss is noticing. So tomorrow, the boss is going to mention all this to you, how he’s noticing that the 5 mins a day you used to spend on Facebook has ballooned into an hour a day.

He’s going to ask you the logical business question: What are we getting for that hour a day you spend on Facebook and Twitter?

Choose your next words VERY carefully. The natural thought process may be to tell the boss that the company has X number of Likes on Facebook, and X number of Twitter followers. But the problem is, your boss doesn’t care about the conversation.

If you want to be successful at social media, you pick the strategy first, then the tactics. You can’t pick the tactics first, then the strategy.

Here’s some examples of strategies for companies that want to use social media:

Establish thought leadership
Build brand awareness
Generate sales
Lower customer service costs

And here are some examples of social media tactics:

A blog
A Facebook page
A Twitter presence
A YouTube channel

See how the strategy has to come first? The tactics flow from the strategy.

Now comes the fun part: “Mack this is great information that I wish I’d had 3 months ago. Now I have a Facebook page and I think we should have launched a blog. What should we do?”

First, let’s start with this: How are you measuring the impact of your social media efforts? How are you ‘moving the needle’? Your strategy will tell you what you should be measuring. Let’s go back to the strategies, then look at the metrics you could be measuring:

Establish thought leadership (Inbound links, Search Traffic, Coverage on Industry Sites/Blogs)
Build brand awareness (Online mentions, Search Traffic, Comments)
Generate sales (Sales, Calls/Emails about Products, Email Newsletter subscribers)
Lower customer service costs (Customer Service issues resolved via social media, Volume of customer service calls/emails)

And here’s a tip: Make sure the metric you measure is helping you reach your goals. For example, a lot of companies think traffic is a good metric to measure. But traffic only indicates people that have visited your blog (for example). You still need for these people to perform an ACTION. So you don’t measure metrics associated with the people (such as traffic), you measure metrics associated with the actions you want the people to take. Such as signing up for an email newsletter, leaving a comment, or emailing you about a product.

So to review:

1 – Pick the strategy for what you want to accomplish via social media

2 – Pick social media tactics based on the strategy you have chosen

3 – Measure your efforts by choosing metrics that tie back to the desired outcomes, based on your strategy. BONUS: Baseline your metrics if at all possible. For example, if you decide that you want to use social media to build brand awareness and you want to measure online mentions. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what your volume of online mentions was when you LAUNCHED your social media strategy? Then 3 months later you could look at the CHANGE in online mentions, and report back to your boss that your strategy to build brand awareness via social media had netted a 27% increase in online mentions.

4 – Don’t be afraid to tweak, adjust, or outright change your strategy. You should constantly track, measure and study your efforts, and the results you are seeing. As you start to execute your strategy, you might see that you need to shift gears and move in a slightly different direction. There’s no harm in changing, all you’re really doing is improving your efforts.

Does this help? What did I miss? Have some questions about how your company can fix its social media strategy? Please ask in the comments, or if you want, email me.

October 13, 2010 by Mack Collier

We were right, most Social Media numbers are useless!

Yesterday I posted two examples of how some social media numbers are completely useless.

One of the examples was how I have almost 22,000 followers on Twitter, and yet I rarely get 1-2% of them to click on any link I share on Twitter. I said we’d check out my traffic from yesterday and see what level of engagement I would have with those 22,000 followers. Here’s the traffic sites from yesterday according to Google Analytics:

GA says there were 604 visitors here yesterday, 251 from referring sites, 226 direct traffic, and 78 from search engines.

For the record, SiteMeter says I had 597 visitors. I tweeted out a link to yesterday’s post THREE times, and as of this writing, it was RTed 125 times.

And if we say that EVERY one of the 600 or so visitors I had yesterday came from viewing that link on Twitter, that still means that less than 3% of my Twitter followers clicked that link. Obviously, not all of the traffic from yesterday came from Twitter, and not all of the traffic that DID, came from people that were following me.

I think there’s two key takeaways from this that I think we need to wrap our heads around:

1 – The level of engagement you have with your Twitter followers as a group is going to be low, and will likely be inversely proportional to the size of the group. If you only have your 10 closest friends following you, obviously you will have a high level of engagement with that core group. But as you grow to 1,000 followers, obviously you can’t be closely connected to all of those people, and their level of interaction and engagement with you will fall.

2 – The level of engagement you have with a certain portion of your Twitter followers will be MUCH higher than that of the larger group. This point is somewhat speculative, but I would bet that most of the people that clicked yesterday’s link also click most of my links. So while I may have a 1-3% engagement rate with my 22,000 followers as a whole, for those 500 or whatever number followers, I may have a 33% engagement rate. Or some other number much larger than 1-3 % 😉

What do y’all think? Does this make sense or sound like complete crap? I think the core message here is to focus on your ‘fans’, and try to connect with them. If you try to connect with everyone, then you’ll probably connect with no one. But how do you figure out WHO is in that core group of fans, and who isn’t? Or what about people that click some of my links, but not all?

Damn I’m getting a headache.

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