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Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

There are now over 600 million people using Facebook. 2 million web sites are integrated with Facebook social plug ins. Facebook has their own algorithm, much like Google, which is called Edge Rank. Having good Edge Rank determines if your posts are making the “Top News” feed. Facebook has two news feeds: “top news” and “most recent”. Top News is the default feed Facebook assigns to accounts and what most people see. It is a snapshot of the “most active” Facebook people and pages you are connected to. Most Recent is the feed that shows what every person or business you are connected to has posted in their status update. As a business, the more you are “shared”, “liked” and “commented” on, the better your Edge Rank.

As a business, you must follow these tips to improve your Edge Rank and help ensure your posts are being seen by your community:

1. Post photos: they get the BEST Edge Rank
2. Post videos
3. Post URL Links out to content (Only posts with URL’s can be shared. Text only does not show the “share button”)
4. Post live, manual posts (not all auto fed)

More Tips About Facebook and Your Blog:

You may also want to consider manually posting your new blog articles into Facebook, rather than auto feeding them in via the notes tab, Networked Blogs app or other automated tool, like Twitterfeed. The reason is, a manual post allows you to choose the best “thumbnail” image to accompany the post. Sometimes, auto fed blogs don’t provide a visual thumbnail (and sometimes they do, so, check the one you are using). People like to see images along with content. Take a look at how your blog article entries look on your Facebook wall now and decide what works best for you. At least 1 post per day should be a live, manual post to improve Edge Rank.

Facebook Like Box - Social Plug In

When it comes to Facebook Social Plug Ins, use the “like box” on your blog. The “like button” is not as viral. It posts 1 line to the wall of the person who clicks it. But, the “like box” makes the post easier to share, shows up on the wall of the person who posted it and includes thumbnail images of fans.

Add This Sharing Buttons

Allowing people to share your blog while reading their Facebook wall posts is key. If someone starts on your blog and wants to share your article in Facebook or any other social tool they use, you should make sure your blog is as “sharable” as possible by adding share buttons to each and every blog article. Add them to the top and bottom of the post. For example, you may use the “TweetMeme” button at the top of the post and the “Add This” list of buttons at the bottom. Be social everywhere you can and encourage sharing.

Have you heard the buzz about Social Media Success Summit 2011—the web’s largest online social media marketing conference?

Before I tell you how this virtual summit will help your business attract great customers and prospects, gain a unique competitive advantage, and measure your social media results, let me share a story with you.

PROOF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING WORKS…

In October 2009, Michael Stelzner started Social Media Examiner, a blog for marketers and small business owners. Almost overnight, his site became one of the top business blogs in the world.

He didn’t advertise, didn’t rely on the press and almost none of his traffic came from search engines.
Slightly more than a year later, his site has more than 57,000 email subscribers, over 31,000 Facebook fans, a half-million page views a month, and has generated nearly $2 million in sales.

Everything he does focuses on delivering high-quality content coupled with intelligent social media marketing.
Michael’s story is not unique. A significant 73% of business owners and marketers plan to increase their use of social media in 2011 (2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report).

What’s the connection? Your customers (and prospects) are using social media every day. Social media is a new marketing frontier because it bypasses all the costly middlemen and allows you to engage directly with your customers and prospects! AND this presents an enormous opportunity for you.

SO WHAT’S THIS ABOUT?
Michael (and his team) have been working for months to bring the best minds in social media together in a fully online event called Social Media Success Summit 2011.

A significant 2,500 marketers and business owners from around the world attended his last Social Media Success Summit. Businesses were transformed. In fact, 96% of attendees said they’d attend again.

This summit’s focus is to empower you to implement successful social media marketing tactics, track and measure your social media ROI, and see how successful social media campaigns were executed. Twenty-two of the world’s leading social media superstars will be summit instructors.

Presenters include Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), Brian Solis (author, Engage), Frank Eliason (Citigroup), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Erik Qualman (author, Socialnomics), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Dan Zarrella (author, The Social Media Marketing Book), and experts from Boeing, Intel, Verizon, Cisco and LinkedIn.

Plus join Andy Sernovitz (author, Word of Mouth Marketing), David Meerman Scott (author, Real-Time Marketing & PR), Jay Baer (co-author, The Now Revolution), Hollis Thomases (author, Twitter Marketing), Steve Garfield (author, Get Seen), and Ann Handley (MarketingProfs)–just to name a few.

Attendees at our two last summits included well-known organizations such as General Electric, American Express, Staples, General Mills, Microsoft, Harvard, San Francisco Giants, MetLife, Kraft Foods, Hyatt Hotels, Stanford, Ben & Jerry’s, IDG and Disney. But you don’t need to be a big business to benefit!

This is the world’s largest online social media event designed to empower marketers and business owners to master social media marketing. And the great news is it’s a live online conference you can attend from your home or office.
Go here now to learn more.

Here’s to your success!
Joann Whetstine

P.S. Twenty-two of the most successful social media pros will show you how to use social media to market and grow your business. Remember, the experts teach the sessions live (and it’s all online). So you don’t need to leave your home or office! Go here to see how this works!

P.P.S. As a way of saying “thanks” for checking out the summit, there’s a gift just for marketers called “8 Steps to Creating a Winning Social Media Strategy” by Jay Baer (valued at $59) waiting for you. Go get it here.

Selling Cookies with Facebook Status Updates

Still wondering if you should start using social media for your business? Here’s a great story about how my neighbor used Facebook to promote her daughters Girl Scout Cookies sales this year.

It’s Girl Scout Cookie time again, as I’m sure you know because you’ve seen many cookie stands out if front of your local grocery store in the past few weeks. I was very pleased to see that my neighbor used social media to get the word out about her daughters fund raising efforts.

One day she posted on her personal Facebook profile the following status update:

“One week from today we will have 108 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies in our house! Please put in your orders quick before I eat all of them ”

All did was reply back with my comment, “I’ll take 2 boxes of thin mints, please!” and the sale was done.

I love that she started getting the word out 1 week in advance, and, as the pick up day approached, she had Facebook status updates:

“It’s Cookie day!!!! Come get your Girl Scout cookies starting at 4pm today ”

Then a few weeks later as the initial purchasing rush has died down another reminder:

“Just stocked up on Thin Mints, come & get them before they’re gone ”

Yuuummm! Who doesn’t love Thin Mints! And, when you know they are almost done for another year, it’s pretty easy to walk across the street and pick up a few more boxes.

Social media marketing works. If you “don’t have time” or “don’t know how” to use it for your business, I can help.

Nuts About SouthWest - Winner of Best Corporate Blog 3 Years in a Row

If your business has jumped on the social media bandwagon, congratulations to you! You’ve taken a big step towards marketing time well spent. But, before you launched it, did you and your company do some strategic planning to decide what your blog should be about?
If not, take a step back and get your strategic planning hat back on. In order to achieve business success through blogging, you need a plan and to determine the following:

• What is the voice of your blog
• What is the end result / goal you wish to achieve

I attended a recent webinar where SouthWest, P&G (specifically ManOfTheHouse.com) and McDonalds spoke about the effectiveness of blogging for their respective companies. There were some big takeaways every blogger and business can learn from:

1. Be Authentic and True to your Brand
   Every blog should mirror the company voice. SouthWest Airlines has a very fun blog called Nuts About Southwest. If you’ve ever seen a southwest commercial on TV, you can see how their online presence mirrors their brand. They state their goal on the blog itself, “Give our visitors the opportunity to take a look inside Southwest Airlines and to interact with us.” Started in 2006, their blog posts content from 30 bloggers companywide and they have won the Best Corporate Blog award 3 years in a row.
2. Add Value with Your Article Content
   You need to give people a reason to visit you, subscribe via RSS and comment on your content. All social media sites (Facebook, Twitter and Blogs) are communities first and foremost. What information can you bring to the community that will make them want to visit you and learn what you have to say? How do you add value?
3. Reach Out for Other People’s Content
   Blogging does not have to be an island in itself. Reach out for others to write content for you. Take P&G for example. ManOfTheHouse.com found great success promoting the Gillette P&G product by reaching out to 12 bloggers to create custom, personal, heartfelt content about their own personal Dad stories in their “Thank You Dad” campaign.

McDonalds actually does not blog for themselves at all. But, rather, they invest in bloggers who already have a strong online presence, like Mommy Bloggers, who are happy customers. They find that having a 3rd party voice lends credibility to their restaurant as the story is told with through a true voice who loves the products.

If you have not yet figured out what your blog is about or why you are blogging, take a look at successful corporate blogs online, think about the ideas above, and create a plan and goals for your blog today. As with any traditional marketing activity, without goals and planning in place, you will have trouble achieving the desired results.

Haircut Back View

Haircut Front View

Combining social media with traditional marketing works. Facebook is great for not only connecting with your current customers online, but also getting new leads and exposure via referral.

Here’s one way a hairdresser used social media (Facebook) for lead generation.

I discovered Rely Local from a postcard at a local shop in my neighborhood. I visited their site and “liked” them in Facebook. A few weeks later, I noticed a post entitled “click Like and be entered to win a free haircut from Hair by Chandra.” I really never expected to win, but, as a social media consultant, I know how beneficial clicking “like” can me to a business, so I was happy to click.

When I won, it was such a nice surprise and this was a really great example of how timing is everything. I had been considering finding a hair stylist in my neighborhood, instead of making the 1 hour round trip to visit the shop I’d been using for awhile. So, when I saw the post asking me to click “like”, I was at the perfect time in my “buying cycle” to pay attention to the post and find out more about WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?)

After the free service, she took my picture and uploaded it to her Facebook Business page from her Iphone. I went online to Facebook as well and added my happy comments and review of her service under my photo and also as a separate post right to her Facebook wall (which showed on my own personal Facebook wall and was viewed by all my friends.)

Because of her contest offer, both her Facebook wall and Rely Local are getting new “likes”, engagement, and the opportunity to be seen by all my local friends (and others like me) who may be interested in using her services, or learning more about Rely Local. This is the viral beauty of social media sharing and how you can build your Facebook “fans” and get more leads with social media.

What a business really needs to realize is that social media tools, like Facebook, can serve as another touchpoint (or “eyeball” if you will) to keep you top of mind to your audience. The more someone sees your posts, they will be much closer to buying from you when they are ready to purchase because of the relationship you’ve built with them in the social media community, in this case, Facebook.

I was thrilled to get a free haircut and happy to have found someone local that I liked. It was a win, win for all. Thank you social media!

The Blogging Success Summit has kicked off with full force. I always attend webinars like these to stay current on what’s happening with social media for big companies as well as learning results from other social media consultant’s client successes.
With three sessions so far, we heard from:

1. Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of Technorati, with a great Keynote speech talking about best practices for brands and bloggers and the State of the Blogosphere.
2. Joe Pulizzi, co-author of Get Content Get Customers, and founder of Junta42 and the Content Marketing Institute revealed twenty actionable tactics to create compelling content.
3. Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, talked about Leveraging Your Blog as a Social Media Hub.

Here were the big takeaways:

As Facebook and Twitter may come and go or social platforms may change over time, a blog stands as your “permanent digital footprint” – the Hub. Every article holds a unique URL which makes it easy to find share and linked to from any social platform. And, and when you wisely use your keywords in your headlines and body copy, you are improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with valuable content that lives online forever.

I’m excited to have been asked to speak at the San Diego North Rotary club on Thursday February 3rd to talk about “Why Blogging Means Business”.

My talk will focus on: the top 5 things every blog must have; how you can easily start one; and how often you need to blog to see results.

You can join us for the Rotary Club meeting on February 3rd, at 7am. It will be located at the Carmel Mountain Ranch Country Club 14050 Carmel Ridge Rd. San Diego, CA 92128.

Visit this site to learn more about the San Diego North Rotary Club at: http://www.sandiegonorthrotary.org/

Have you heard the buzz about Blogging Success Summit 2011—the web’s largest online blogging conference?

Before I tell you how this virtual summit will help your business gain more exposure, more qualified leads, better customer engagement and more sales, let me share a story with you.

PROOF BLOGGING WORKS…

In October 2009, Michael Stelzner started Social Media Examiner, a blog for marketers and small business owners. Almost overnight, his site became one of the top business blogs in the world.

He didn’t advertise, didn’t rely on the press and almost none of his traffic came from search engines.

Slightly more than a year later, he has nearly 50,000 email subscribers, a half-million page views a month, and has generated nearly $2 million in sales from the site.

Everything he does focuses around delivering high-quality content along with intelligent marketing.

Michael’s story is not unique. A significant 43% of U.S. companies will be marketing via their own blog by 2012, according to eMarketer.

Now the connection… Blogging represents a new marketing frontier because it bypasses all the costly middlemen and allows you to own your own platform, quickly engaging with your customers and prospects! AND this presents an enormous opportunity for you.

SO WHAT’S THIS ABOUT?

Michael (and his team) have been working for months to bring the best minds in blogging together in a fully online event called Blogging Success Summit 2011.

More than 4,400 marketers and business owners from around the world attended his last two summits. Businesses were transformed. In fact, 95% of attendees said they’d attend again.

This summit’s focus is to empower you to implement successful blogging strategies, grow a loyal following, generate quality leads and sell with your blog.

Twenty-three of the world’s leading social media superstars will be summit instructors.

Presenters include Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, Scott Monty (head of social media, Ford), Darren Rowse (co-author, ProBlogger), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Michael Stelzner (Social Media Examiner), Debbie Weil (author, The Corporate Blogging Book), Douglas Karr (co-author, Corporate Blogging for Dummies) and experts from McDonald’s, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, Sony and Procter & Gamble.

Plus join Joe Pulizzi (co-author, Get Content Get Customers), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Jay Baer (co-author, The Now Revolution), Chris Garrett (co-author, ProBlogger), Dave Garland (author, Smarter, Faster, Cheaper), Mike Volpe (VP of marketing, HubSpot), and Rick Calvert (CEO, BlogWorld)—just to mention a few.

Attendees at our two last summits included well-known organizations such as General Electric, American Express, Staples, General Mills, Intel, Harvard, San Francisco Giants, Kraft Foods, Hyatt Hotels, Stanford, IDG and Disney. But you don’t need to be a big business to benefit!

This is the world’s largest online blogging event designed to empower marketers and business owners to master blogging. And the great news is it’s a live online conference you can attend from your home or office.

Go here now to learn more.

Here’s to your success!

Joann Whetstine, Social Media Marketing Consultant

P.S. You can get 50% off if you act now. Twenty-three successful blogging pros will show you how to use blogging to market and grow your business.

Remember, the experts teach the sessions live (and it’s all online). So you don’t need to leave your home or office! Go here to see how this works.

P.P.S. As a way of saying “thanks” for checking out the summit, there’s a gift just for marketers called “Building Community with Facebook and Blogs” (valued at $59) waiting for you. Go get it here.

As Social Media becomes more and more the norm in online marketing, there are many resources now available where you can keep current on social media tools, results and tips. I thought it would be helpful to share some of the resources I use. Visit the sites below and “like” them or subscribe to their blog via RSS, or ask to receive their e-newsletter. The more you know, the better you will be able to manage your own social sites for maximum engagement, “likes” and, (what everyone really wants), sales and revenue increases:

Social Media Examiner
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

Mari Smith – Facebook Expert
http://www.marismith.com/

SmartBrief
http://www.smartbrief.com/

Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/

Darren Rowse – Problogger
http://www.problogger.net/

Brian Clark – Copyblogger
http://www.copyblogger.com/

Denise Wakeman – The Blog Squad
http://www.biztipsblog.com/

Chris Brogan
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/

Lewis Howes – LinkedIn Expert
http://www.lewishowes.com/

I’m so excited to attend the Facebook Success Summit #fbss10 this month. I’ll be posting to my blog with a recap of the key takeaways from the presentations. It’s very important to me to stay current on what is going on in the dynamic space of social media marketing, and that is why I am taking part in this virtual webinar series through the month of October. With people spending a 55 minute average amount of time on Facebook, you want to make sure your page is a great experience for fans and also “sticky” enough so they will want to keep coming back.

How to Create a Compelling Facebook Presence that Generates Profits
Social Media Marketing guru, Mari Smith gave a wonderful presentation with a 6 step Facebook strategy. Once you have set your goal for using Facebook, these are the steps to follow to achieve it:

1. Design – Make sure your Facebook Welcome page is designed to meet your goal (ie. Are you trying to get more people to opt in to your list? Make sure to include your email collection box.)
2. Content – Decide how often (frequency, time of day) to post good content to your fans and what kind. (links, videos, other people’s content.)
3. Promotion – Decide how often to run special offers, coupons and promotions.
4. Engagement – Make sure you are engaging your audience with questions and fun.
5. Conversion – Are the fans buying or doing the action you’ve requested of them (ie. Joining your list, commenting on your wall). Track as much as possible.
6. Scalability – When your fans grow into the thousands, do you have the internal support staff to continue your current level of service?

How to Build and Manage a Loyal Fan Base
Amy Porterfield and Cindy King, managers of the Social Media Examiner Facebook Fan page, gave a great talk outlining how they keep their fans engaged and happy. Here are their 5 tips:

1. Engagement – Respond to every post and use their name so it is personal.
2. Ask Questions – You don’t always have to ask something specific to your brand (ie. What is your favorite frosting.)
3. Use @ Tags – If your fan page has a personal profile behind it and you are “friends” with the fans, you can “tag” their name in a post to build relationships.
4. Use 3rd Party Articles – Reference someone else’s article and then pose your own question or comment about it.
5. Negative Comments – If you receive negative comments, don’t ignore or delete. Use it as a time to shine.

The Power of Facebook Advertising
Facebook has exceeded Google in the weekly market share of total internet traffic. Facebook is now the largest display advertising in the world as of 1st Quarter 2010, surpassing Yahoo. Chris Treadaway told us about how you can easily test Facebook ads and how extremely targeted and cost effective they are.

Chose to show your ad based on geographics, gender, age, birth date or marital status. Pick keywords people display in their profile. Choose to exclude those already following you. You’ll see the estimated reach numbers before you make the ad live. You can choose from the self service option spending as little as $1 per day or sponsored ads, with a $5k minimum. Be sure to run your ad for at least 7 days to get results, before deciding to change copy, headline or photo images. Track results over time to determine the ad that works the best for conversion.

Again, before you can get the results you want using Facebook for business, be sure to set a clear goal then follow some of the suggestions above to achieve it. If you need social media training or help with social media strategy, I can help.