10 New Social Articles on Business 2 Community |
- 3 Landing Page Optimization Lessons from Lady Gaga
- How to Use Twitter for a Business
- Pondering: The Key to Social Media Networking
- Useful Official Links From Facebook
- SEO Speak: Social Signals
- How Often Should You Revise Your Social Media Crisis Plan?
- Social Media Success Also Breeds Risk
- Why You Should Shorten Your Google+ Link
- Using Google+ 1: Finding Content, Saving Searches, Directories, Engaging, Sharing, Tagging, Targeting People of Influence
- Why Twitter Needs to Change to Keep Up with Social Media Marketing
| 3 Landing Page Optimization Lessons from Lady Gaga Posted: 06 May 2012 01:30 PM PDT The Good News: You found a winner! After countless variations of A/B landing page testing, you've finally optimized your landing pages, dramatically reduced bounce rates, increased conversions and at long last declared a landing page champion! Woo-hoo, Congratulations! The Bad News: Your tried-and-true champion has gone unchallenged for months and results are starting to stagnate. On top of that, recent analysis shows your winning landing page's conversion rates appear to be slowly skidding along towards a downward trajectory. Not Good. So now what? You need to push the dial. It's time to act fast and test something completely new – something fresh and innovative to go head-to-head against your champion. So, where do you start? Take a deep breath along with a good, long hard look at your landing pages and ask yourself one simple question….what would Lady Gaga do? Here are 3 tips to help you add innovation to your landing page testing cycle, Gaga-style: 1. Embrace your diverse audience Lady Gaga's catchy pop music and glam pop persona appeals to widely diverse audience. I understood that immediately as I passed through a sea of outlandish Gaga-inspired costumes and grabbed my seat at the Monster Ball this year. One thing that completely took me by surprise me was the woman seated next to me. She was a hardcore, hugely enthusiastic, Gaga fan who also happened to be around sixty-seven years old. As I looked around, I started to notice numerous little monsters of the AARP demographic. My point here is that you can't make assumptions about your audience. You may have many hidden layers of segments and sub-segments just waiting to be discovered. Adding segmentation to your landing pages is one of the best and easiest ways to gain valuable insights on who exactly your audience is. Once you have a deeper understanding, you'll be better able to speak their language and appropriately tailor offers and messaging. The lessons learned from segmentation are a surefire way to develop pages that will get your audience to convert. A side note: You've heard Gaga's duet single with Tony Bennett, right? Coincidence? I think not. 2. Stand out from the crowd As the camera pans the celebrities seated at the VMA's, or the Grammy's there's always one performer that instantly grabs your full attention. Whether she's wearing haute couture or laminated meat, Gaga knows how to get noticed. Which leads me to my next point, how does your page stand out from the crowd? One way to instantly find out is by utilizing the site preview tool on the Google search results page. It's a great way to quickly compare your landing page creative to all the surrounding competitor pages in a single glance. If you aren't familiar with it, it's the little blue magnifying glass icon that appears next to the search result link. Whenever you hover over the icon, a preview image of that web page pops up. It's an invaluable tool for quickly scoping out the competitive landscape. Check it out and see how your landing page stands out from the rest. If your page wilts like a wallflower into the background – even if it is solid performer – chances are, your conversions could be much higher. Start testing an eye-catching innovation that is daringly different. 3. Entertain, Connect and Share Your audience is everything. How well do you connect with them? If you've seen the Google Chrome commercial, you know that when it comes to social media, Mother Monster is the reigning queen. With over 10 million fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter, she has eclipsed every other celebrity on the planet. What makes her unique? The difference is that her fans are not only wild about her music and fashion, they are also personally invested and share a deep connection to her story and message. Gaga's impressive following demonstrates the power of social sharing. Social widgets on your pages can spread your brand exponentially as well, but the catch is that people tend to only share things that they find valuable or interesting. That's why it is important that your page entertains and forms a connection in addition to being informative. A page full of heavy text would be radically more interesting if the same copy was repackaged and represented through video, infographics or animation. Landing pages are the perfect laboratories for experimenting with different media types. Fan generated content such as testimonials or videos uploaded to your pages could have a huge positive impact on conversions by adding transparency to your brand along with social proof. However, this doesn't mean that you should go crazy with animation and roll out pages that are chock full of bells and whistles. The goal is to strike a balance between being clear, informative and interesting. Get creative with headlines by speaking to your audience on a deeper, more personal level (easier to do with segementation). Be clear, honest and upfront about your offers. Strong, clear offers work; people often follow brands just to stay ahead of special promotions and offers. The bottom line is that everyone has an innate desire to be entertained and to connect with others. Make sure your content is share-worthy by making it engaging and valuable. Break new ground with your landing page testing cycle, by stepping out of your comfort zone. Take a cue from Gaga and imagine that your landing page innovation is your stage. When you step out there, be bold, be brave, be different and stay strong little marketing monsters!   |
| How to Use Twitter for a Business Posted: 06 May 2012 12:00 PM PDT
The UK user base for Twitter is growing every day. Every time you see one of the huge Saturday night TV shows (X Factor, The Voice, etc etc) promoting their Twitter handles or hashtags, more of their mass-market audience think "hmm, what's that all about" and many of them will go ahead and set up an account. And Twitter is addictive, so what starts with following a feed from Saturday night TV can easily become a big part of the 36 hours an average UK user spends online each month. Many heavy internet users now rely entirely on their online experience for information – they've not bought a local paper in years, and usually fast forward through TV ads. So, you're only going to get the chance to influence those people if your business is active and well connected on Twitter. Plus, the way Twitter works makes it almost unique as a fast communication medium with your business's current (or future!) customers. Here's an example of all the things one brand could've discussed with their customers, in just a few hours on twitter… I already use Twitter, but how do I use it for my business? If you've already got to grips with the basic functions of Twitter, but aren't sure how to apply it to the commercial world, here is a super-simple, five-minute outline of how to create a strategy for your business on Twitter. Step 1: Look and learnBefore you do anything, take a look and see whether anyone is already discussing your company or products on Twitter. Use the Advanced Search function for a short-term snapshot, or there are other social media dashboard tools which can help with this – socialmention.com is one of our favourites. What's being said? Is there a bias towards customer service or support (for example, a lot of people complaining about a particular function of a software programme) or are people complimenting or just mentioning your company – either of which gives a great opportunity to develop a dialogue with your customers? It's also worth taking a look at what your competitors are doing – this is just as likely to highlight what won't work as what will! Both of these exercises will help you with step 2. Step 2: Twitter ObjectivesOr, deciding what you want Twitter to do for you – and even more importantly, how you using it will benefit your customers. That's the thing about social media, if you don't offer some value to your followers, they'll tune you out pretty quickly. The detailed answer to Step 2 can be complex and will be different for most businesses. If you found that the answer to "who's talking about us" in Step 1 was "nobody", then you might want to start by changing that – even the smallest neighbourhood boutique or restaurant will benefit from happy customers giving them some love on Twitter. Think carefully about what you could do ("find and reply to people asking for recommendations in my sector") or say ("let followers know in advance when we've got a sale coming up") which will benefit the Twitter community. As an example, we're always happy to help anyone who asks us questions on Twitter, but as every third Twitter account belongs to a "social media guru" we tend to focus on providing a great information feed. So although there are masses of spammy, low quality articles out there around social media, our followers know that following us on Twitter will help them find just the most important, carefully selected articles which are relevant to them as business marketers. Step 3: Your perfect followerJust sending out great content or being helpful won't get you an army of Twitter followers – at least not in the early days. You need to be a bit more proactive. Create a "perfect follower" profile for your business. Does it matter if they're male or female? How old they are? Where they live? How often they tweet, and how many followers they have? You may never come across Mr or Ms Perfect, but at least you'll know what you're looking for. Step 4: Build your audienceUse your follower profile from Step 3 to set up some searches, so that you can find the right kind of followers either from their Bio information, or from the kinds of things they talk about in their tweets. Join in with their conversations, but politely and without pushing your business – imagine you're standing next to them at a party and you won't go too far wrong. Step 5: A great content planWork out what makes great, shareable Twitter content for your particular business. If you're a Bakery, your followers would probably appreciate recipes for delicious looking cakes – even if they'll never get around to making them because they're too busy. That doesn't mean that you'd send out nothing but recipes though. To keep things interesting, try and brainstorm at least four or five "themes" to talk about. Is all this starting to sound a bit like being in charge of a magazine? Then you're on the right track. Step 6: Be a good Twitter citizenThis one covers a multitude of sins, but the way you run your Twitter account REALLY reflects on your business. Everything from poor spelling to ignoring @ mentions may lead followers to draw negative conclusions about you. Spotting someone mentioning your product and thanking them, even if they didn't mention your Twitter username, gives the opposite impression. Avoid the negatives by checking in regularly, chatting to your "friends" on Twitter even when they're not singing your praises, following back, and occasionally reviewing what you've sent out over the past month. Then, you just need to figure out ways of creating extra positives and delighting your followers!   |
| Pondering: The Key to Social Media Networking Posted: 06 May 2012 10:00 AM PDT
I began pondering about networking and decided to go old school with my pondering post this week and ask some friends what they thought was the key to social media networking. These are all people who excel at making and keeping connections with a wide variety of people on multiple platforms and thankfully with me! One of the main ingredients to success in social media is networking and creating the support system that you need to help you build and grow your social media presence. Consider the relationships you are creating and building with people online. How are you maintaining these important contacts? Helping others with resources, sharing their content and engaging in conversation are all ways that you can build relationships online. Meet new people, introduce friends to other friends and make valuable connections. that will help establish your own community and grow in social media. Make good use of your social time. All their names are links to their Twitter profiles, if you aren't already following them I encourage you to do so and see great social media networking in action. Jeff WillingerSo many answers , so little time 1. It's fun Lori McNeeFor me, the key to my social media networking success is a combination of the four "C's". I am a Consistent social media user who provides high quality, relevant Content of value that reaches within and outside my niche. I Connect and engage authentically with my audience and often meet IRL (in real life) where I can continue the Conversation. Tony HastingsIn keeping with my blog's format here are my 10 key elements of success in social media networking: 1. Be genuine. 2. Be positive. 3. Reach out to new people and 4. Respond to contact. 5. Build good relationships. 6. Write good profiles. 7. Use multiple social media platforms. 8. Have something to offer. 9. Keep up to date with new developments. 10. Don't over promote yourself. AR KarthickWhether you're using social media networking for personal purposes or business, ENGAGEMENT is the key. You see, it's not a one way stream. It's like crowdsourcing to form ideas and evoke improvements. If you would like your fans, followers and friends to get involved in bestowing some beneficial action to your brand, you need to pull them in. It's only possible through sheer engagement however good your business and products are. Try and find the right method, use the right content and tools – you're all set for the terrific social media networking. Paul BiedermannI believe the true power of social media is seen when relationships that are first started online are pushed offline. I look at social media as the door opener where relationships are nurtured and strengthened, but then really solidified after group meetups or face-to-face meetings. I feel like I can now travel almost anywhere in not just the U.S., but the world and call someone up to have coffee or lunch. I have met amazing people who know me, like me, trust me, support me, advocate for me, consult with me, partner with me and hire me. Chris BurgetThe key in social networking is building relationships through sharing great content. Don't be afraid to step outside your own niche when it comes to tweeting, pinning and liking others blogs etc., Be sure to expand your different social media channels to include Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Google+, or pick a few social media channels that work for you. Have fun and remember that building quality relationships takes time. Brian RiceIn order to be successful while networking via social media you must have patience, focus and full commitment. While social media makes it easier to interact with other people it can take longer to develop deeper connections. It is important to remember to engage with and highlight others and avoid becoming an echo chamber of self-promotion. Finally be sure to take the time to connect with your social media connections offline to help build stronger relationships. Jure KlepicI believe that the key for social media networking is to understand how the social web is working in the first place. The web is build around people, and not businesses, and in order to be successful you need to understand the web and consumer behavior. Next, to be successful in social media networking you need to: - choose the right networking platform These are few points that I see being broken daily and not respected on social media. *** I hope that you got a few great tips from these master networkers, I know I did! What works for you for networking in social media? I'd love to hear about it. Resources: The 40 Most Approachable Social Media A-listers on Twitter The Top 35 "Connectors" on Twitter 4 Steps for Effective Online Networking Featured image courtesy of ecstaticist via Creative Commons.   |
| Useful Official Links From Facebook Posted: 06 May 2012 08:30 AM PDT At Social Colleague we have several clients who rely heavily on Facebook for the majority of their social media presence. If this is you, then we thought this would be a good opportunity to help you with some official resources from the social network itself. Many small businesses, and even some large corporations, are not aware of the valuable resources. Facebook is one of the best social networks (in my opinion) for providing such official advice and best practise guidance for businesses. Here we'll attempt to break down what the most important links and guides are you for and your business. "These solutions are designed to be used together to drive business results: a new Page to tell your brand's story, Reach Generator to easily and regularly communicate with your fans, and Premium on Facebook to share your most important messages to your larger, targeted audience." Facebook Pages This PDF is a particularly useful resource for small businesses look to provide the best experience for their fans. Detailing best practises for timeline images and graphics, along with how to best utilize features such as milestones and the new 'pinned' post and message features. The guide also gives some good tips as to the best way to optimise your updates and postings, along with the giving a few hints at the most likely post types to receive quality engagement. Put simply this is a guide to expanding how many users you're page reaches on a daily basis. Facebook says; "Businesses are better in a connected world and Pages are the essential place for businesses to connect with their fans. On average, fans spend 2x more with businesses than non-fans.¹ Right now you may only reach 16% of your fans each week.² Reach Generator guarantees that you reach 75% of your fans each month and an estimated 50% of fans each week³ in a simple, always-on way. Fans will see your message as a sponsored story on the right-hand side of their homepage or in their news feed on desktop or mobile." Admittedly the reach generator is not available to everyone, and you may have to contact Facebook to see if your business qualifies (they have been known to be slow to reply sometimes). However, if you can qualify it certainly is worthwhile. Giving additional options and features to advertisers within the social network. Simply put, this is a feature that allows businesses to reach 'the right people at the right time' According to Facebook, meaning greater prominence and are 40% more likely to be engaged with. Other useful links include a Facebook Ads & Sponsored stories guide, best practises and some ways to best measure success within your Facebook campaign. All in all, https://www.facebook.com/business/fmc/guides is a really beneficial resource for all business sizes. What do you think? Take a look at some of the guides and share your thoughts. Can they improve on what they have already shared?   |
| Posted: 06 May 2012 07:30 AM PDT It's been a while since I did a new entry in my "SEO Speak" series the last entry being in January about what a content strategy is and how it impacts your SEO. However, with all the recent talk of changes to algorithms with Panda and Penguin, the SEO community has begun talking more and more about the importance of Social Signals to your rankings. So what does this term really mean? A social signal is an interaction with your website on one of the social media websites, such as a +1 on Google, a Facebook Like,a Tweet with a link to your site in it and now a Pin on Pinterest with a link to an image on your site. These interactions are read by Google and are seen to be a measure of how popular your site or content is. So the more of these social signals you can get the more Google will perceive your site to be important. The increase in use of the term "social signal" really started to come about when Google launched Google+ as their social media site in competition with Facebook. Although Google were a bit late to the party, only making their service widely available to the public in September last year they have made it clear that they value social interactions with your website as being an important part of the search marketing world today. In January they began talking about "Search Plus Your World" Demonstrations of Google's new importance on social have come through with the introduction of Social reports in Google Webmaster Tools and more recently Google Analytics. As part of "Search Plus Your Word" Google are also promoting people's social profiles in the SERPs so people who have connected they blog profile with their Google+ page will appear with an image and author name in the results, pushing interaction of people searching with real people. If you are a Google+ user Google will also promote search results for pages which have been +1′d by people in your circles. So what does this mean for your Search Marketing? Well, as these social signals become more prevalent and as you need to be making more use of social media sites to promote your business. More and more you will see results with Author bios and promotion of pages which your contacts have +1′d. This means that the SERPs are very responsive to websites which have these social elements. So, as I mentioned in my new year's resolution blog in January; 2012 is the year to become social! Social Signals also mean it's more important to create great content which people will want to share as this opens the door for people sharing your content on other sites such as social bookmarking sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg. What should I be doing? Well, by now you should be up and running with pages on the major social media sites which are relevant to your market place. Make sure that you are regularly engaging with your audience on these forums with news, conversation and monitoring what they are saying about you. Make sure that the content on your website is easy to share on the social networks by using social share buttons on the If your bloggers have Google+ pages ask them to connect their author biog on your blog to their Google profile. Consider running paid social media campaigns as well, which can be used to interact with people who meet your target demographic, this can help to get more people to your site or could be used to create more Facebook Likes. These are just some of the ways you can take advantage of Social Media and hopefully gives you a good view of what we are talking about when we discuss "social signals".   |
| How Often Should You Revise Your Social Media Crisis Plan? Posted: 06 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT
The more it remains top of mind, the better your entire team will handle and overcome a crisis once it presents itself to your organization – and this is one skill you want your entire staff to acquire and hold onto. Revise, review and practice your social media crisis plan at least yearlyNow this is a bare minimum. For enterprise level organizations, non-profits and those with a popular social media presence, your social media crisis plan should be revisited semiannually or quarterly and your crisis team should run regular practices. In addition to this, your crisis communications plan should be revised each time: There's a change within your internal stakeholders There's a change within your external stakeholders Post crisis As you adapt new social media guidelines, strategies and platforms for your social media marketing efforts The launch of a new product, service or campaign Revising, reviewing and practicing your social media crisis plan should include a minimum of the following:
The more practice and emphasis your organization puts on the importance of your social media crisis plan, the better you will handle a crisis when it presents itself to your brand. It is in your organization's best interest to make the effort to keep your crisis communications plan at the top of each of your employees minds. How often does your organization revise and practice your social media crisis plan, and what would you add to this list?   |
| Social Media Success Also Breeds Risk Posted: 06 May 2012 04:45 AM PDT I've occasionally used this blog to document my social media journey and in that spirit it would be impossible not to mention last week's epic Social Slam event. By successfully gathering 600 social media friends and fanatics and highlighting some of the coolest speakers and topics anywhere, this must be considered a milestone, a signature moment. And while I am filled with joy and pride for this event, I could not be honest with you without saying that the week was filled with trepidation. You see, success on the social web also breeds increasing risk.  Gini Dietrich kicks off Social Slam Although Social Slam was spectacularly run by the Knoxville Social Media Club, my name is inexorably associated with the event as its founder and the person who puts the program together. Leading up to the event, I shuddered each time I saw somebody tweet that they were attending "Mark Schaefer's conference." Ten years ago, if something went wrong at a conference, the damage would be limited to a little grumbling. If something failed at Social Slam, the news would spread though millions (yes, millions) of possible social media impressions. If the room was too cold, if the wi-fi didn't work, if the lunch was awful — that is what would be recorded, that is what would be remembered. Potentially, that is what would go viral. No person or company receives any direct financial gain from Social Slam. It is an entirely non-profit initiative so that we can keep the prices at a point where anybody can attend. In fact, that is our vision. If you attended an event featuring speakers such as Mitch Joel, Jay Baer and Gini Dietrich in New York, it would easily cost $1,500. Unless you're working for a big company, who can afford that? You could come to Social Slam for $79 and get a whole day of content, networking, breakfast, lunch and an after-party to boot. And yet, I realized that although this was entirely volunteer-driven (even the speakers donate their time) we would be inevitably compared to professionally-run events in big cities. In the era of the social web, there is no room for error any more. Tom Webster in the process of making statistics hilarious As it turned out, I don't know how it possibly could have been better. Here is the best indicator of success — You know when you go to conferences and see people milling about outside the main room doing emails and phone calls? During Social Slam the halls were empty. Everybody was stuck to their seats because the content was so amazing. Yes, the wi-fi worked. The room was comfortable. The lunch was delicious. The parties were a blast. The speakers rocked. The social web hummed with positive comments. And yet mid-way through the morning, the weight of the #soslam hashtag attracted the attention of porn spammers. The stream of "Mark Schaefer's conference" was quickly hijacked with hundreds of disgusting tweets automatically produced by bots. Other companies, not even in attendance, tried to sell their wares by adopting the popular conference hashtag like little social media leeches. And unbelievably, even individuals in my home town (who I have never met) sat on their couches at home and threw darts at a conference they have never attended in a pathetic attempt to feed their need for attention. The grotesque irony is that the better we are, the bigger the target becomes. The bigger the target I become, too. Mitch Joel pushed the crowd to think of social media in new ways. And this leads me to the inevitable question — Why? Why put myself through it? My business is thriving without it. My books are selling without it. My friends and students love me without it. Why work all these hours just to become a target for creeps? Here is the lesson of taking big risks in the social era. Even if it pays off, you put yourself, and your brand, increasingly at risk. Success breeds hate and corruption. It always has, but now it's automated and it's amplified. So if you want to take a step on to the national stage, you better have a helluva thick skin. I am still driven by this idea of creating an entirely new kind of social media destination. Of creating an event centered on relationships instead profit, on content that breaks new ground instead of re-hashing the most popular themes, on showcasing worthy new voices instead of the same 10 middle-aged white guys. How far can our passionate band of volunteers take this thing? So, this is my way of saying thank you for your support … and I'll see you at Social Slam next year. There has been a lot of content developed following Social Slam 2012 but for a nice short round-up I recommend this summary from Chris Craft. Mark Schaefer is a marketing consultant, author and college educator who blogs at {grow}. You can also follow him on Twitter: @markwschaefer.   |
| Why You Should Shorten Your Google+ Link Posted: 06 May 2012 04:05 AM PDT Have you ever tried to give anyone a link to a specific web page – not a top-level domain, but a sub-page of that domain – in person? If you have, then you will undoubtedly understand that it's not particularly easy to do it. That is especially true if the URL happens to be long. Your Google+ URL is a long one. It's not going to be something you can easily remember if someone asks you for the link. If you use a service to shorten your link, you'll be able to use it more easily for many different things. For example, you could easily print a short link on a business card. This will allow you to gain contacts in the offline world as well as online. You could easily add it to blog posts without having to look up the URL to copy and paste it. It will fit much better in an email signature or a forum signature. And people will be able to remember it easier if you have to tell them the URL in a face-to-face meeting. You want to make things as easy as possible. Whenever you can make something easy for someone, they will be much likelier to take action. In the end, that is exactly what you want. If you want to make contacts, then you need to make sure to make it very easy for them to follow through on what you want – in this case, adding you as a contact. There are several different services currently available for shortening your Google+ URL. The most popular is Gplus.to. You can shorten your link to gplus.to/yourusername quickly and easily, and it will be very memorable.   |
| Posted: 05 May 2012 06:45 PM PDT Note: These are the transcripts of some of the videos from one of the most complete Google+ training for people that want to learn how to get most out of Google+. I formatted it to ease reading, and am not allowed to included any images, but even though you will learn a LOT! If you would like to get the full course, including videos, MP3s and Transcripts go here… In the meantime, Enjoy! Hi, Tim here from the Goggle Plus conspiracy code with video 3. This time we're going to go through the Google+ account and actually use it and show you some of the best practices. This is actually part one of a two part video because there is a lot to cover. So let's get into that and show you how to do that now. Ok, as I mentioned we are going to go through and set up, sorry, not set up, were going to actually go through and use the Google plus account, so at the end of this video, or at the end of the 2 parts video you are going to have a good understanding of how to use Google plus to actually get some good benefits and gain maximum leverage. We are going to be covering stream and we'll talk about that. Stream is the equivalent to the newsfeed in Facebook. We're talking about finding content, using what's hot and saving searches. Searches are a way to, well we will go through that anyway, a way to actually find content that you can actually share with other people. We're gonna talk about making yourself stand out of the crowd, some tips on doing that. Also how content attracts people like bees to honey, and the fact is that you need content and how easy it is to actually find content that is relevant for your own niche. In addition we're going to be talking about directories. What they are and why there useful. Were gonna be talking about engaging with people by commenting and adding plus ones, we'll actually show you how, well, I'll show you how to actually do that. How not to be labeled as a spammer because one of the things that will happen very quickly is Google will shut down your account or other people will be reporting you as a spammer and as a result of that you're going to be shut down. So were gonna show you how some of the things not to do as well. We're going to show you how to share a post in your stream, A stream again is your stream of content which other people can connect too and see. So we're going to show you how to do that. We're also going to take it to the next level and talk about sharing other peoples content, and part of that process would be how to tag people in conversations as well. Tagging is very useful to do, when you tag someone, they actually get notification in their stream of content, that you've tagged them and it can be a way for people to see what you're talking about and hopefully to get them to follow you. So were gonna do that. And just a bit of an overview while we're doing that as to why plus one comments are important, why are we doing it for? Is it all about fun or are we doing this for a particular reason? We're going to discuss that. And the other interesting thing is why the employment info helps attract people and helps get people connecting to you. Were gonna talk about it, were gonna show you an example of my profile and the information that I've actually got recorded in my profile and why you should probably not put what you think you would normally put in the employment profile. Targeting people of influence is another thing because obviously people have already got a large circle of followers, we wanna try and get engaged with their followers and also that person, so were gonna have a talk, I'm gonna actually show you an example of how I managed to engage a person of influence. And why in the profile and the about text, we talked before about the employment but also why the profile and the about text, you know the information that we keyed in our profile, why that is so vital to get right and to make sure you spend some time, you know really putting some good information in there. Now I know it all sounds harder than it looks. You probably thinking, well we're actually saying, it's not as bad as it sounds, that's really the bottom line. It's not anywhere near as hard as it sounds and the best way of doing that, or proving that if you will, is for me to actually go through a demo of that now, so let's get into it right now, I'm gonna actually demonstrate how to do some of these things. Ok, so let's actually get into our Google+ profile, you can see this is the user, I'm a G+ user, that we set up in our setup video, which was video 2, so let's go and use some of the functionality within Google+. Firstly we talked about the stream, understanding the stream and sharing in your streamWe did a little bit of this in the setup video; I just wanted to go through over here again and show you. This is your stream this is by default, you're seeing everything. So, if you click your home button up here, you'll actually see all your streams but if you want to just have a break down you can actually select only certain categories if you will certain types of streams. Click on friends for arguments sake. Now we haven't got any friends to find, we've got people featured on Google I believe. You can just see just those people if you just actually want to do it that way. It's not particularly useful. Now this is your stream here, in terms of the content. Now everything that is from other people who are sharing information to you, is going to appear here in this stream, so this can get very crowded. If you're following hundreds of people it can get very crowded. So what I suggest you do is over here with the stream, even though we talked about having one persona per niche and I suggest you do that. You might have an account where you'll actually be looking to create information, sorry to find information that you can share, what you can do is you can create a news stream and what you can do is, the advantage of doing that is stream again is you can go into circles and so forth which we will talk about a bit later. The advantage of doing that is, when you go to circles I'll just give you a quick example. someone like Lady Gaga, now she's already defined as music, Now we can create a new circle if we wanted to we can say information collection, we're gonna create that. Now if we go back home again, there's information collection. Now at the moment if you click on that, there's going to be absolutely nothing in there. What we can do, as we go through the video I'm going to show you how you're actually going to use this. But what you can do is put all the information that you're using to send out in a particular stream, you can go back to it at any time which is actually very useful. But before we do that we need to find out how to find information, now there's 2 main ways to actually find information. Find content and again the reason we're finding content is we are attracting people so people obviously go where the content is, so we want to go to the content as well. What's hotOne way, is to go down here to what's hot and these are the things that are the posts that are actually getting a lot of +1's. Click here to view the embedded video. In other words people are engaging with it or getting a lot of comments. Here's a example here of breaking news and you can see here its had 262 comments its had 250 shares that means 250 people have shared this on their stream and that will actually create back links which we will talk about shortly anyway and also 195 people have +1'd that, so if we were wanting to plus one that, we said okay were just putting our hand up to say yeah, okay that's interesting, we can just click on plus one. So were actually engaged now with that person and what they can see now at anytime is, they can actually go into their plus ones and they can see who has actually shared it. You can see if we click on this button now, this will actually show you, there's us Imag+user and all these other people, it actually gives you the names of all the people who have actually +1'd that post. Now the other thing we can do is we can click on the comments , we can scroll down the bottom and there's gonna be quite a bit of space because there's 260 comments, now you can actually go through there, whoops I'll just get to the bottom of that and you can add something. Now for example, I haven't actually read too much what the post is so perhaps we won't do that we'll leave that to a later stage. The point is what's hot is something there that's current, breaking news if you will. So what we'll do is we will scroll down a little bit and we'll see what else is there. Because that's just one article, one story and there's going to be lots of other stories. So we'll scroll down and we'll see what else is actually available there. Ok, hers another story… We gave people an iPad 2, told them it was the new iPad and they loved it. That's quite an interesting story. People obviously not realizing that the iPad2 is not the new iPad which is the iPad 3. Something else. Star wars and you can see this is like a large one and this has had 1029 +1's and 477 shares. So this is a way for you to just find some content. Now the content may or may not be relevant, the thing is you don't always have to be 100% of the time be publishing content that's, you know perfect for your niche. For example, if you're in dog training you don't always have to be publishing dog training information. You'll find that if you do that people will probably get a little bit sick of the information your sending, so it's good to mix it up and if it's something that is interesting, like that photo now that's interesting with dog training, now that's a picture of a cat by the looks of it, now that could be something that you could sort of weave in somehow to your niche. So it's very very easy if you want to share it. So if you decided yes I wanna share this, I'm interested in this, I wanna send this to my circle. In other words to the people who are following me I can just click on this share button. Now it's very important up here to actually type something in, if we just clicked on share and then selected who we wanted to send it to, we would normally select public, I recommend for nearly all so you'll be just clicking on public. But if you were using a persona for more than one niche, then here is where you would only select a niche. So you would only select say people, family if you wanted to send the post only to them you'd select that. what we would recommend normally is you would select on public because we're using one niche per profile and basically anytime were publishing to public, which of course has got the other advantage of being picked up in the search engines because some of these other ones may or may not be picked up if we don't select public, and you can do multiple ones as well. Now if I'd just clicked on share now that's quite valid, you can do that but one of the reasons I suggest you don't do that is we want to add some content here, we want to give our followers, the people who are following us who have added us to their circles, a reason to click on there. So this text here, which is originally by Diane Cosgrove, she's the person who originally contributed this little post, we might wanna add something. This would be where you want to create the link between your group of people, the people who are following you and this article. So give them a reason to engage and give them the reason why so they can sort of come and cross and say you know this is interesting, I'm quite interested in following this. So you say something like…. This is a cool, this is just an example obviously, this is a cool picture of a cat, yes, I know, not a dog. Now it's probably not the best example of posting of the information I've added, but the point I really wanna stress here is that you need to make sure this contact here is engaging. Yes, you can use keywords, there's no reason not to use keywords, so if dog training was a keyword that you were following, you could put something in there, weave that into it but do take the time to put something real in there and don't just try and be a spammy type person. But anyway in terms of sharing all we have to do at that point is click on share. That's now been shared to the people who are following us, in other words who have added us to their circle. Now if we click back on home you can see that now automatically appeared and you can se that's come up from us Imag+user and you can see the text that I've added but below that link and this is the magic of Google+, below that you can see it keeps the original person. Can you see its got a link there to her profile and a link there to her post an it's also got her text again and the picture. Now, so the +1's and the comments down here now are actually rating to your share. If I clicked on plus one, that's the first person whose plus oned this post, coz this is sort of your own post which is a copy of Clare's. If you wanted to go back and comment on her post, you'd then need to click on this button here and that goes back to her version of the post and there we have it with the 265 +1's, 124 shares etc, and you can see there now 124 shares, imag+user has just shared that. We've actually shared that and it shows that. This is one of the beauties of Google+, all that information is available to you so you can start seeing how people are distributing their content and you can start mirroring that and start doing the same thing, which is just wonderful obviously. So we will go back home again, can you see the power of this? Not only is this a link and we're actually sending off content, now this is probably a bad example of content in the sense that there's not a lot of text here. Now obviously search engines like text and images but mainly text so obviously it would be good to pick a post that's got a lot more content but again were not always looking at it from the search engines point of view, sometimes were looking at it at from the actual person's point of view. When in actual fact we should be doing that more than search engines because the search engines generally go where the people are. But the point I'm really gonna wanna stress her is, use links. So you can become the person that other people are sharing, so can you see how quickly this is going to go viral? Because every time they share, you can see in this case this share Clare Cosgrove has got a link to her profile from my stream, so that's another link and also to her post. So that's very quickly created a back link. This is the magic of Google+. In this case we go back to her post again; you can see that that number is actually going up as we are sitting here as well. 125 people have shared so there's 125 links that have happened and this is only 8:41, the time is 11:05 as I'm shooting this, so in a few hours Clare Cosgrove has already received 125 back links at least. Let alone all these comments as well so she's got a lot of engagement. These comments are also good because every time someone comments on that as well that's someone else those comment are actually showing up as well so that's fantastic and you can see people have been individually clicking on these +1's. This is another way for you to engage as well with pots. if you look down and find something that you think is cool, you can either click +1 up here, clicking +1 up here means that you agree with that and you can see the counts gone up but if you like a particular comment, you click on +1 great effect. So in other words we've added our +1 to his comment so he'll be able to see that he's got a +1. If Mike Gableman goes back and checks this he will be able to see that you've +1d it so again it's very engaging. And if we wanted to add something, again were not on our shared copy of this post were on the original one. If I scroll right down to the end….Thanks for showing us a cool pic. Now the other thing we can do, I wanna talk about tagging, sorry I've just gone back up to the top again I'll just to find her name. I can't remember what her name was, Clare Cosgrove, that's right. Now if you wanted to actually have a reference to Clare, you could put +Clare. You could see when I typed in the + and there's her name. So if I actually post the comment now, she will actually see that in her stream that you've actually posted it and she gets notification that someone's actually commented. So that's a great way to capture someone's attention. Now I'm not going to do that now, only because I have the user name of Imag+user and I don't really want to get this account banned and have to repeat these videos. But in an ordinary world, people like feedback and I'll be surprised if someone hasn't done that. They'll probably make a liar of me but generally it almost; there you go there's an example there, someone else has done that. Great find Clare Cosgrove. So that's a reference to that one. So that's the type of engaging comment you would actually make. Right, so I'm going to make the comment, I'm not gonna put that, so that will just appear as a regular comment and it won't show up in her, she won't get a notification saying that I've actually done it. Because we obviously don't want this account to come across as being spam in any way. Alright so that's how you go about tagging. Tagging again is very useful. We're going to show you some more examples of making yourself stand out from the crowd and so forth, but that's a great way of actually capturing someone's attention. Well, let's get back to where we were which was what's hot? So that's one way and again every time you do that you'll get a new list of news. And that changes all the time basically. When a new item comes out you'll actually get that in there. But the other way you can actually find information is just by doing a regular search. Google+ Real-time searchSo you can type in, again our trustee search dog training…Click on the search. Now that's gonna save and give us information about dog training. Now we've got lots of options here. We can search on everything, just people and pages, just posts that have got the term in it. Sparks, which is basically feeds and hangouts, that's people who have video hangouts who are actually live now. Generally I'll leave it on everything. You can put from, the ability from everyone, from people only within your circles. So an internet marketer we would normally put from everyone and from everywhere. You can put in a particular location if you only wanted to find a particular amount of content from a particular place in the World. Again, generally you would be selecting everywhere, now this will give you a list of items that have got something to do with dog training. You can see there the words dog training's there and there's people who have commented on there so there's lots of information. Now if you only wanted to go back and look at posts about dog training, coz if you decided, ok, I don't wanna necessarily find people at this stage. Although this is quite a valid way of doing it. But I wanna find some posts about dog training. I can click on Google+ posts. Now that's just going to show posts that have got the words dog training or are about dog training mentioned. We can scroll down and find something. Say were interested in this particular article, were gonna have a look at that, that's a fairly new article, it's only been added a few hours ago today. Coz it's just after 11 over here and its 9:18. So if we were interested in that one we could click on +1 and again we can do a comment like I showed you before. I won't do one in this particular case but very easy to find information and if you thought that information was good for your list, in other words people who are following you on Google+, you could share that. That's another way of doing it again. You put in your comments, you click it and it would go into your stream. And remember any time that you share information and you share it publicly like this, it automatically goes into everyone's stream, who have you in their circles. So if you've got a thousand people who have our account in their circle by just sharing this, a thousand copies of what you've shared goes to a thousand pages effectively. Can you see how powerful this is? This is the power of Google+ and especially then if the content that your sending is of high quality, if your information is interesting and you know relevant to what their needs. If they share it, that could go to a thousand people or however many people are following them and it can go viral very, very quickly and you can get thousands or tens of thousands of links very, very quickly. So this is one way for you to find content. And one of the great things I like about this is you can actually save your search so that when you save it, I'll do that now. You can see its appeared down here now so that if we go back to what's hot for arguments sake, any time we want to go back to our dog training, we can click on that and that can come up, so you can save as many searches as you want and bearing in mind that this will save search, so if something else comes out then this will be renewed. It's like an RSS feed. In other words, it's updated constantly so it's not saving the status as it is now. It's actually saving the actual search so that every time you click that button you'll get the latest search. The other thing of course you can do here is the best of, to get the information that Google+ is telling us is the best, so its normally in terms of sharing or engagement, is how its factored in what's good. So alright that's just one example of finding content. So, you could do that for each one of your keywords for arguments sake or general keywords and build up a list. And that would be a good way of finding content. One of the cool things you can do, because if you think about it, let's just say you were down here in this post. You can actually see that this post will eventually get lost, if you looked at that post and thought, that's a really cool post, I might look at distributing that or sharing that next week, but of course every time you click on this button here to search again. That's gonna show you the new list. The new list of what's the latest stuff for dog training and you might actually find that you lose that. It gets lost and you can't remember where it was. Well, really a cool little tip for you to do to save it, is to click on the share button, but this time you don't share to public. You actually create a circle that is just for your sharing. Now you remember before I talked about and I created the information collection? So we can actually put something in there and up in here you can actually type what you think is relevant. You can say, this is great dog training information for puppy owners. Basically you're putting a comment that's of interest to you only, to give you a heads up on what this content is for. Again were sharing this to the information collection circle of which there are no members other than us. Does that make sense? So in other words it's there purely for us, it's our internal tracking of a particular post. So when we share that, if we go back up here, now it does appear when we click on home it does appear here in our stream. However anyone who's following you would not see that because they're only following, they would have to be part of this stream, of this information collection stream to see that. And if we have a look here under the circles, under information collection we actually haven't got any people. We've got the information we've collected and the only person in there is Lady Gaga but the thing is they have to add us back, in other words they have to add us to their circle before they see any of our content. So we can put anyone we want in a circle but they won't see any of our content until they add us to a circle and this is the reason of course why were looking for great content is to make sure that that content is something that people will pick up on and wanna share and they wanna start following you. So the point I'm making here is there's one person in this video who we added earlier Lady Gaga, she won't actually see any of the information collection unless she adds us back. If she adds us back, in other words if she adds us to the circle because remember any time you add someone to any of your circles they get a notification email or an SMS depending on how they've configured their notifications they will actually get one of those back to say that that's happened. So that's something to keep in mind, in actual fact if we go back and have a look for featured, actually I'm in the wrong spot, if I just go back to have you in circles. You can see here we actually have got a place, if you remember we added a number of people in the setup video and this person Nova Fm which is a radio station in Australia, they actually added us back. So people do that, just by the pure fact that you're actually adding people, you will get people to add you back. Twitter is notorious for that; I wouldn't say that's necessarily the best strategy. It's a strategy but I think you need to back that up with good content as well. Because people will look at your stream to see what is relevant and again the information that they see by default is your public stream. Let's go back to where we were anyway and the point I wanna show you then is that information, that useful post, if I click on information collection, you can see here that I've got that original article that I've added, well I've actually got two. I've got one from Lady gaga but I've also got the article that I added. So this is a way for you to collect information and of course if you want to distribute that, too share that n the future, you would go down to her original post again, open that post up and you would share it as you would, as you did before but this time you would change that to make that public and you put in your note there. Alright so that's a great way for you to actually find or to give yourself a reminder about the information that you want to share. Look I suggest you use that. I use that often, if you find a good post or you happen to see a good post, don't think you're gonna remember it later, the reality is your aren't going to remember it, tag it straight away or put it into its own collection, its own stream its own circle if you will and that's gonna make it a lot easier for you to track and be able to share that at a future date. Making yourself stand out of a crowd.Now it's very important that you pick a strategy to make yourself stand out of a crowd. Now I wanna just show you a couple of examples of people who are doing something different on Google+. For example this guy, Rahul Roy,now I like this guy and one of the things he's doing, he finds lots of images. You can see here he's got 7 and a half thousand people, he's actually, a lot of the stuff that he does is finds images and he actually shares images. That's it and that's how he attracts lots of followers. If I just scroll down and have a look you'll see there's lots of different images and he's always coming up with them. In actual fact today, that's about 3 hours ago; he's added one and before that he added another one and that's really what his forte is. He doesn't always do it sometimes he shares other information but more often than not… Voices don't sleep under your bed they sleep inside your head and he does get some engagement as you can see. Thanks for noticing this new noticing has been noted. He's got some good information but he's mixing it up and people are interested in images. Images are a great model to look at, so consider that as one option. Another option is this guy; I'll just copy his name off screen. Now this guy is all about information. Now you can see here, whoops I'm in the wrong spot, I did the wrong search, I'll go back to there again. Click home and I'll search, oh I know what I'm doing wrong. Third time lucky Tim. will he get there? Ok, that's what I was trying to do, click on his profile. Ok now this guy, Denis Labelle, he's got 51,000 people in his profile and he's all about very relevant information. He's very concise and he's got lots of information and you can see he's getting some engagement there on it's of his posts. So he's already out there today he's posted a few articles. You can see there he's got 91 shares, some comments +1's. Again at any time if you're liking something you just click on +1's and I suggest you do that. Get into the habit of using +1's and commenting stuff if you find it interesting because again that's setting up links back to your profile automatically and its showing Google that your actually an engaging user and not like a spammer whose not contributing to the betterment if you will, of Google+. So his model is good information he very much categorizes Google+, your business brand and organization that's what he's talking about. One other guy, just to give you a bit of an idea and these are only three ideas, there's numerous other ways of doing it. This guy's bearing cartoons so he's obviously someone who's very gifted with drawing. A cartoonist. So he does lots of cartoons and you can see some of these are old ones so he's sharing some of his old content as well. He's got a funny little picture, a caricature for his profile picture and he's getting lot of engagement you can see and he's very relevant. As today is St Patrick's day as I'm filming this and you can see that there's been people commenting. Alright, so that's just three ways and he's got 10,000 people. Now interesting this guy he's actually following 4,900 people and he's got 10,000. Some people will find that they don't want to follow anyone or they'll follow only a couple of hundred, I suggest you follow at least 2-300 to get started if not more. but this guy he's following a lot more because if you start following thousands of people your stream is going to be so full, it's going to be very very hard to keep a track of all that and that's when you would really have to have separate categories, separate circles if you will for each type of person, so that each time you follow someone you have to put them in the category of what your following them for. I suggest a smaller number than that. There's lots of others, music is another option, videos or it can just be good information as you saw. There are a couple of different ways there. You need to have a think about what's gonna differentiate yourself between the average person and you. You really want to try and stand out of the crowd so people will want to share your information. To come up with something. So it could be like funny pictures, music as I said there are lots of options there. Directories are like yellow pagesOk, next let's just talk about some directories. I've actually got a shared post here which I'll paste in. Directories are, think of it as yellow pages (Find People On Plus – . http://findpeopleonplus.com/ It's just a way for you to get into various publications and it's just a way for other people to find you. Now some directories will automatically find you. For example this one here, find people on plus, If I just quickly go into that one because we obviously don't have time to go through them all in this video. So we can just do a search for my name, Tim Buchalka. I've actually got two accounts in there, I've actually got another test account, it's a bit outdated but the information is very updated. It's interesting though it gives you some information plus clout, what's your engagement factor if you will and employment. Now that information is actually outdated, I'm gonna talk about that later in the video, you can see this option here, you can add as a circle so this is a good way for you to find people, this is also away for other people to find you. So that's why it's good to get into these directories, using the right keywords and so forth to actually ensure that people are finding you. Now I didn't actually add myself to this directory, this directory is very good coz it has got over 45 million people at the time of shooting this video that have already been found and indexed. Lots of other ones and they all do different things like circle count has more than 4.8 million Google profiles indexed. Social Stats – www.Socialstatistics.com- is another one, the hottest Google+ posts which is interesting, so you can go to there and can actually find out the hottest posts. so I'm gonna leave you a link to this one, this is probably not the newest directory bear in mind that like anything its evolving over time, so new directories will come out and existing directories will you know perhaps not become as popular as they once were. But get yourself into directories because it's very important to, a very good way of actually getting people to find you. Others are: http://www.circlecount.com, Bearing in mind as well of course, if I'm actually in one of those directories, I've actually got a back link from that directory to my Google profile which of course is going to build up the power of my Google profile. the more directories and so forth your part of the more power your profiles going to get every time you actually send out some information. Shared CircledShared circles is something else, I just want to quickly show you that. I'll give you an example of a shared circle. Now this is something, we talked before about Bearman cartoons he actually came out with a shared circle. A shared circle is, we talked about the concept of circles, where you can actually put people into a circle and categorize them, you can actually share that entire circle. So you can see how powerful that is. Bearman cartoons has done that. If we click on his view shared circle button, we can see what's happened here, as you can see my names in there, so he's actually added me to it and I actually got him to add me to his profile. Now can you see the power of this circle? Because what's actually happened is Bearman has actually this is Bearman cartoons, has shared this circle with all these people in it and this has gone out too all the people, all 10,000 people who happen to be in these circles and of course I'm in that circle. You can see the power of that circle of that view shared circle, sorry of the shared circle because it's really giving you the ability of another way to get on to the stream. What I found really quickly with i was, as soon as he did that I had about a hundred people almost instantly sign up and add me to their profile. So remember, what will happen is, they will see this, they'll click on that and then they'll have a look and go who is that guy? Who is this handsome guy? Notice information, I'm gonna show you where you actually set that, coz you can see when people actually hover over it, some of the information may or may not be relevant, some of its okay. But we need to make sure that we actually set the right information there. This is someone's first, other than my good looks, if they wanna know who is this Tim Buchalka, what is he about? Ok, an internet gook with a passion to share, and you can see very easily then I can just go click on add, friend. Let's just say it was a friend and they've added you and suddenly you've got someone following you. That's the power of circles, how easy it is for someone to add you so you need to make it easy for them to give them the reason to make sure they've got the right information. Of course in the meantime they can click if they wanted too as well. Alright I'm gonna cancel out of that, I'm gonna talk more about how I got into that view shared circles a little bit later in the video and times ticking on. We've talked about engaging people with +1's and comments, that's how you have to start. You can pump out some information and I suggest you do that, get some great information out and add it to your stream. But to get people to be able to start trying to find you, you need to be out there engaging in other peoples comments, you know step one basically is to get out there and do that, So I suggest you d that. To have people follow you basically you've got to follow people. I've got another little post and these links I will be posting, they should be on the page actually. I've got a little interesting bit of information here, some rules about how to attract people or rules of circling, which is of course that and following people. The 10 commandments about circling
10. Now we talked a little bit before about it you wanna make sure you're not an anonymous person you wanna really be someone. Someone whose got a proper profile picture, a real person even though we are creating an internet persona, we can as much as possible give the appearance of actually a real person. That's actually very, very important. How not to be a spammerNow, how to be a spammer would be how to do, how to be all the opposite of these things. If we didn't have a profile picture or we started putting up lots of content with you know watch this, click this, do this buy this now. In other words if we're doing all these things here, the opposite of these things here were probably going to be labeled as a spammer. If we start posting comments on people's posts, saying this is good, click here to buy my product or look at the picture I added. if your to self promotional, you're gonna get yourself in trouble and that's what we're trying not to do. We wanna com across as someone who is sincere and interesting that people wanna naturally buy. Now this again leads to why +1's and comments are so important, every time you +1 and you comment, any time you do a tag with using the + sign and the person name, your starting an engagement factor and the person can see that but also Google can see that and Google I having a look and measuring those +1' and comments to identify how engaging you are as a person and obviously how much power to give your profile. So the more you do this, the more you're out there engaging, particularly early on where your creating your profile the better it's actually gonna be for you because its going to help raise your profile in the eyes of Google and its going to help your content rank later when we get to those future videos. It's very important to do that correctly. Current employment info and the about informationWe talked before about the current employment info and the about information and why it's so important. I just wanna show you why that is important. So if we just go back home and do a search for my profile. Ok if i click on, actually I'll go back there again coz I actually found the result. Unfollow! You can see there already Internet geek with a passion to share. That line there, is very important. By default that's actually your employment, for mine that was my employment one. I actually changed that. If I go back into my profile, if I click that. Click on About, here. Employment Internet Geek with a passion to share you can see how I change that? So that's actually my employer, and I changed that to be something interesting so that people would actually see that, otherwise if they saw the name of my employer and most people would probably be thinking what's the problem with that, what the big deal there. First couple of paragraphs, and sentences are very important in your About. Make sure they are interesting. I've talked to you that I am very passionate about Google plus, Boo hiss Facebook trying to make a joke. "I've been told I am funny, someone said I was a joke". I am trying to engage people. They might be clicking on hundreds of profiles so you want to try and stand out of the crowd a little bit and this is one way of doing it by putting in a basic bit of information. So again the important thing there is Employment, the Employment section. And I put a brief rant in the Employer section. Well a bit of a comment and that's what someone will see when they click my name. I'll just go back to show you that again. If someone happens to search my name, see there, that's what they see. That's the first thing they actually see, so it's important to get that right and filling out that profile. Targeting people of influence and how you can get them to add you.Ok, we are getting towards the end of this video; the other thing I just wanted to point out was I talked about targeting people of influence and how you can get them to add you. Let's just go back to this post here. This is that Bearman cartoons. Now this guy on March the 2nd came up with a post and he was looking to put together a shared circle. You can search for this by the way. Search for shared circles or words to that effect to find people. So anyway he actually set get on the list by circling me if you haven't already. Now that's really clever already because he is getting people to circle him so he gets more followers. And he had some criteria there. Basically he asked you to talk about yourself so that he would actually want to add you to his shared circle. So if I scroll down here, way more than 100 people commented and he was only going to put 100 people in the shared list. There you are, that's me. So I actually put something on there. I mentioned who I was, blah blah blah blah blah, making a nice living online, showing some negative perceptions of this industry, and it can be a little hard to stand out of the crowd. I try and be a little bit different and tell it like it is. Now that's what I mean and I notice there I clicked the +Bearman cartoons so he would get a notification about this. You can see lots of people didn't get this right someone put too many spaces because it hasn't come up correctly, or include enough information. Mine was a two pronged attack because I wanted to get added to the list, but also that there would be a lot of other people looking to become part of this and they will be scanning these profiles. I actually put links to a video I posted about myself, talked about what I am doing daily videos, questions plus I am an Aussie, am told my accent is cute, so I ended up making a reasonable sized post. Some people put quite short posts, some put they wished they could engage more during the day, this one here is a student, they didn't put a + to the persons name. Anytime you are commenting on a persons profile I suggest you put plus and the name of the person to make sure they get to see your notification, so you can get them to engage you and hopefully follow you. Interestingly enough, by getting myself added to Bearman Cartoons shared circle that second guy Denis Label, the one I showed earlier in the video who had 50 thousand people following him he followed me as a result of that. So that was interesting, so I am getting engagement from a large person with 50 thousand followers purely because I took the time to start engaging. Now I've done very little engaging. The followers I have got so far I have got from very little engaging and this is the only guy I have engaged in this manner so far. If you were doing this a lot more, you would be getting a lot more followers more quickly. Keep that in mind it's very easy to do. Ok well this video turned into an epic and I think it's cracking a few hours or feels like it anyway, and my voice is feeling hoarse. So I'm going to end it there and I hope you have got a lot out of this part 1 getting the most out of Google plus, in part 2 we are going to talk about some things we have not discussed yet and consolidating where we are at. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in Video 4. Get the full course, including videos, MP3s and Transcripts here…  |
| Why Twitter Needs to Change to Keep Up with Social Media Marketing Posted: 05 May 2012 03:30 PM PDT Twitter has long dominated the social media scene in terms of spreading the word to a lot of people at once. The reach of Twitter is incredible. For every one person that reads a comment of yours on Facebook, there's a chance that a dozen will read it on Twitter. Facebook posts have to be re-shared and reshared to reach a million people, but as Charlie Sheen and Ashton Kutcher have proven, a Twitter post can reach a million people in the blink of an eye.
1. A Lack of Community You don't have friends on Twitter, you have followers. Google+ allows you to post similarly to Twitter, posting short ideas and jokes and links, but they also encourage a sense of community with comments threads and Circles. Twitter has nothing like this. There are people following you and there are people you follow, and that's about it. Well, there are Twitter lists of course, but they are under-used. There are a lot of ways to approach this problem without sacrificing the simplified, bare-bones nature of the site that users find so appealing. Something like small social circles or short comment threads could easily be implemented without seeming like clutter. The impersonal feel of Twitter makes it great for short updates and sharing, but while Facebook feels more and more like Livejournal every day, Twitter has made almost no evolution whatsoever in any direction. 2. Zero Monetization Other than the money that Twitter collects, nobody is making anything on Twitter. A marketer who's looking to launch an ad campaign that will pay for itself will look at the monetization available on other social networks and make the obvious choice. They look at Twitter, and all too often, they see nothing but an expense. True, it's possible to make a Twitter following really pay off, but only in the long term. An ad on Facebook or an affiliate link on Blogspot will pay off immediately. 3. The Lack of Multimedia Multimedia isn't the point of Twitter. If they add comments, friends and unlimited multimedia, then they're just copying Facebook. However, sometimes users don't want to click a link to see a picture. Small embeddable photos, videos and other multimedia might be a great way to create a more natural and immediate Twitter experience. 4. Maintaining Their Identity This is another major challenge if they do hope to make changes: How can they keep up without losing their identity? The issue here is that Twitter's appeal is largely their simplicity. If users have to learn how to use multimedia settings, profiles and so on, they may lose interest. Unfortunately, as it stands, Twitter isn't really a way to make friends or really, truly connect with people. It's a way to get attention, perhaps, but a Twitter user is just one voice in a sea of noise. It's hard to stand out against that. Whatever the answer is, Twitter needs to find a balance between being the short-sentence side of social media without falling behind. 5. Public Image Public image isn't too big of a problem for Twitter, but there is a degree of bias against the site. Many people don't feel that Twitter is worthy of their time, they worry that there's absolutely nothing of substance to be found or shared on Twitter. The truth is that, if used properly, Twitter can be an incredible tool. Unfortunately, it's a much more difficult tool to use properly than Facebook or a blog. Where you can build a small, dedicated following with a blog, or a larger, somewhat-involved following on Facebook, you're building an enormous and barely connected at all following on Twitter. Most users have a lot of followers who don't even read any of their Tweets. Twitter is a necessary component in the fast-moving age of iPhones and Androids, but the shallow user experience, the lack of any real monetization angle and the lack of any real sense of community may turn marketers off of the site in the long run. Social users, casual users will likely continue to use Twitter for as long as the site remains available, but businesses may turn more and more towards other means of getting the word out.   |
Why use Twitter for business?
Networking. Does this seem scary to you? Unable to figure out where you should start?
Your social media crisis plan, in all of its importance, is not something you want to prepare once, file away and then forget about. It's something that should remain top of mind for your entire staff – especially those who play a role within your social media crisis team. Though this is not something that happens naturally, through all of your daily duties and busy schedules, it'll take a conscious effort for your crisis communications plan to remain top of mind.
However, this wide range of influence may not be enough to keep Twitter relevant to marketers who rely on social media to get the word out. Here are some of the major problems Twitter needs to address if they hope to keep up with Google+, Pinterest, and Facebook.| You are subscribed to email updates from Social | Business 2 Community To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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