22 May 2013
#INFOGRAPHIC: How to Use 10 Social Networks to grow Your Personal Brand
05:59 0
21 May 2013
33 Blogging Tips to Maximize Social Media Reach
Via Heidy Cohen Blog:
While many bloggers think that blogging is about lovingly crafting each post, the reality is that you need to promote your content to ensure each post reaches its widest possible audience. To this end, think outside the blog.
Since social media feeds on a never-ending stream of content, it’s ideal for accomplishing this goal.
Here are thirty-three tips for using social media to expand your blog’s readership by driving traffic from an array of platforms.
1. Claim your name on various social media platforms. Where appropriate, register your blog’s name separately.
- Complete each social media profile. Let people know who’s behind the avatar. Also, include at least one personal detail.
- Link to your blog in each social media profile. Include your blog address (aka URL).
- Use blog keywords in your social media description. Enhance your social media optimization by consistently employing your top keywords.
- Continue your blog’s branding. Make your social media profile is recognizable by incorporating your logo and/or blogger headshot.
2. Include social media sharing buttons on your blog. Make it easy for readers to share your blog content. If they have to jump through hoops in terms of remembering passwords or signing in, you’re hurting your content’s sharability.
- Add social sharing buttons at the top and bottom of your post. Reduce reader hurdles. Don’t make readers scroll to the top to share your content.
- Thank fans publically. Make social connections who share your blog posts feel good by giving them a shout out of recognition on social media.
3. Make an appointment to engage and share content regularly on social media. Don’t leave your social sharing activity to chance nor let it consume hours of your time.
- Create a social media sharing schedule. Set a time and mark it on your calendar to check in on what’s being said on social media and to share information. Make this part of your daily work routine to streamline your activity and be consistent. This is a good activity to do when you have small chunks of time such as commuting and between meetings. (Here’s the lowdown on creating a social media editorial calendar.)
- Aim to show up on social media at least once a day. Use this time to share and/or schedule content. Even better is to stop by three times a day such as morning, noon and close of business.
- Keep your blog-related social media time separate from your personal social media interactions. One easy way to accomplish this is avoid personal use of social media during your work hours.
4. Give your social media shares the personal touch. While you can set up automated social shares, it’s more personal to provide contextually relevant commentary to information you share.
- Provide contextually relevant social sharing. Tailor your social shares to the social media platform and avoid the cookie cutter approach.
- Use the power of your community to help spread the word. For this, Triberr is useful.
5. Leverage the power of images on social media platforms. Images are powerful tools to draw prospects into your blog posts.
- Use images to attract readers. Include at least one image per post. This is most important for Facebook and Pinterest.
- Create tailored, shareable images. Ian Cleary of Razor Social recommends using PicMonkey to incorporate text into your image.
6. Respond to social media comments related to your blog posts. Encourage followers who’ve shared your content by answering comments on the appropriate social media platform.
- Thank people who share and comment on your blog posts publically. This is a great way to build your community.
- Let people know that you’ve referenced them in your blog posts.Give them a social media shout out.
7. Be a good social media citizen. Participate on social media beyond sharing your own content.
- Engage in social media activities. Become part of the community. Be selective and interact in one or more social media forums. One benefit is that, once people get to know you, they are more likely to share your content.
- Help others on social media. Answer other people’s questions and where appropriate, share a link to a relevant blog post.
8. Avoid the “Me, Me, Me” on social media. Mix up the content you share. Don’t limit your social media activity to promoting just your own content.
- Curate other bloggers’ posts to help establish your authority in the field. In Peggy Fitzpatrick’s words, “Being generous with other’s content helps your own content and your social media karma.”
- Space your social media shares over time. You don’t want to fill up other people’s social media streams with your blog posts in a short period of time since this will tick them off.
9. Test different strategies. Don’t just continue to do the same thing because it’s what you’ve always done.
- Monitor what other bloggers are doing on social media. Keep an eye on other bloggers’ social media activity to get ideas for how to expand your own use of these platforms. Understand that social shares aren’t necessarily the best measure of success.
- Modify your social media approach. Test using different forms of content and posting times.
10. Track your results. Don’t just guess what’s working, really measure your progress.
- Use a social media call-to-action. This helps prod readers to read and share your content.
- Measure blog activity related to your goals. Count actions that contribute to sales.
To maximize the readership of each blog post, use social media consistently and effectively but avoid excessive self-promotion.
What are your favorite tips for using social media to distribute your blog posts?
Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Heidi Cohen
01:26 1
Dropbox vs. Google Drive vs. Amazon vs. Skydrive: Which One Is Fastest?
As cloud computing services become ever more popular, you might begin to wonder how much you can really trust them to perform when you need them? I decided to find out - by testing the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services.
In many ways, getting a file from one computer to multiple computers is the most challenging task for the cloud. And because I like to use multiple computers running multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows and the Mac, that function is particularly important to me.
Cloud Services Can Lag
I am pretty agnostic when it comes to cloud providers - as long as they are free or close to it. However, as I was moving files around while preparing my most recent book A Week at the Beach The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide I was a little surprised at the lags I sometimes experienced using the big-name cloud-based file-transfer services.
More than once when I wanted to use a file from one computer to another, I was disappointed by my cloud services. There were a few times that I got so tired of waiting for a file to show up on my other computer’s cloud drive that I resorted to sneakernet using a USB thumb drive.
After my book was published, I decided to go back and run some simple tests to see just how long the four best-known file-transfer/backup services actually take to put the files where you want them.
To compare Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive I started by exporting a 500K JPEG test image from Lightroom on my Windows 8 computer directly to each of the four services.
Fighting The Randomization Factor
After running the tests a few times, I noticed what can only be described as random operating system differences. Sometimes the file would pop up first on my Mac and other times it showed up first on my Windows 7 laptop.
In order to eliminate the operating system differences, I restarted the tests and this time stopped the timer when the file showed up on either my Mac running Mountain Lion or my Windows 7 laptop. I also reran my tests with a variety of sizes and types of files. In all I ran twenty-five sets of tests.
The differences were significant, if not overwhelmingly huge. The fastest synchs took less than 3 seconds, while a few others took several minutes. The biggest chunk of tests clocked in between 10 seconds and one minute. A few synchsnever completed. But which service recorded the best times with the fewest problems?
Dropbox FTW!
Dropbox ended up being fastest 56% of the time. Even more importantly, it was slowest only 4% of the time.
Skydrive brought up the rear. It was fastest on 12% of the tests, but but slowest on a whopping 80% of the tests. It also had two files that never showed up on the Mac and one that never showed on the Windows 7 laptop.
The Amazon Cloud slightly outpaced Google Drive - which had one file that never showed up on the Mac and another that took a very long time to complete.
If my tests convinced me of anything, it is that Skydrive is a work in progress and has a long way to go. I even had trouble setting up the tests on Skydrive.
My tests also revealed a number of odd results. When testing files saved from Word, strange extra files sometimes showed up on all the cloud drives except Dropbox. The file names always began with the characters “~$”. Sometimes the mystery files disappeared and sometimes they hung around.
Cloud Drive Recommendations
So here are some quick recommendations:
- First, do not treat your cloud drive as one huge dumping ground. Create folders and try to force a little organization on yourself.
- If you save a file to the cloud in order to work on it from another computer, quit the application or close the file on the first computer after you have saved the file to the cloud drive.
- Make sure you have a local copy of important files in your documents folder - not just the replicated cloud folder on your computer. Interesting things sometimes happen when cloud files get updated or deleted from another computer. When you come back to the computer where you first created a file, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
- If you cannot get a cloud folder on your computer to update, trying quitting the cloud application or rebooting your system.
Dropbox and Amazon appear to be the most reliable solutions with only occasional delays. Google isn't far behind, and I can't imagine that Microsoft won't work hard to improve Skydrive - the company's subscription model depends on it.
Even so, I have no plans to throw away my USB thumb drives.
01:15 0
Yahoo Buying Tumblr for $1.1 Billion, Vows Not to Screw it up
(Reuters) - Yahoo Inc will buy blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion cash, giving the Internet pioneer a much-needed social media platform to reach a younger generation of users and breathe new life into its ailing brand
The deal, announced on Monday, is a bold bet by Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to revitalize the company by co-opting a Web property with strong visitor traffic but little revenue.
The combination of Yahoo and Tumblr creates an online powerhouse with roughly one billion users, which will draw in more advertisers and help Yahoo keep visitors on its properties for longer periods of time, Mayer told Reuters in an interview.
"Tumblr in terms of users and traffic is an immediate growth story for us," she said.
Analysts say Yahoo appeared to be overpaying for a business that has never posted a profit, makes a fraction of Yahoo's sales, and may not contribute significantly to revenue for years. But the company, rebuffed by the French government when it tried to pay $1 billion for video site Dailymotion earlier this year, had to do something to plug a hole in its social media efforts.
Yahoo made clear it was sensitive to concerns that it might damage Tumblr by making it less irreverent or more corporate.
"Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business," Yahoo said in a statement.
The deal will make Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, 26, a multimillionaire.
Tumblr is one of the Web's most popular hubs of so-called user-generated content, drawing young people who use the platform to post pictures and text. It has more than 100 million blogs in its network, ranging from "White Men Wearing Google Glass" - a collection of photos poking fun at the early adopters of the wearable computing devices - to housing-focused "The Worst Room."
Though Yahoo remains one of the Web's most popular destinations, it has seen its revenue shrink in recent years as consumers and advertisers favor rivals such as Google Inc and Facebook Inc. The deal is expected to increase Yahoo's audience by 50 percent.
The acquisition, which will use up about a fifth of Yahoo's $5.4 billion in cash and marketable securities, is the largest by far since Mayer took the reins in July with the goal of reversing a long decline in Yahoo's business and Web traffic.
01:06 0
20 May 2013
#INFOGRAPHIC: Why Big Data is Next Big Thing?
Source: http://venturehire.co - http://venturehire.co/courses/bigdata/
05:26 0
#INFOGRAPHIC: Periodic Table of Social Media
This Infographic is Published by Inbound Visibility and Designed by Webds
05:21 0
3 Steps to Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy
By
Why is social media so important? More people are using social media through their mobile phones, computers, and tablets than talking, calling, emailing and texting. Do you find this surprising? I know I don’t. Some businesses have gone to the extent of allowing 30 minutes a day for their employees to use social media.
There’s a lot more to engaging in social media marketing than creating a few profiles and posting a few links. Without taking a measured approach to the situation, you’re not going to be able to make the most of what is a very powerful and influential strategy. There are thousands of other companies competing for social media users’ attention, so laying the right groundwork is crucial.
Create a strategy you can maintain
In order to be effective, your social media marketing efforts have to be ongoing. There is no finish line. As you reach goals, you need to create new ones. Otherwise, you’re sure to go backwards. By understanding the importance of having an ongoing social media strategy, you will be ahead of the game from the start. Check out the chart below illustrating the key phases in setting goals
Assess the Situation
You need to know where you are in order to get where you’d like to be. With that in mind, you should make the following assessments:
What is Your Main Goal with Social Media?
Stay focused. What do you want your strategy to achieve? There are three broad options: raising awareness, increasing loyalty and increasing sales. Select one and focus on it.
- Listening – Listen to what others are saying about your business.
Tip: Use Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn search function to search your brand or product/service. It will populate a list of tweets, posts etc. that others have published. Setup a Google Alert to monitor business mentions around the web.
- Communicating – This is about getting your message across to your target audience. This could be for you current advertising efforts and making it more socially interactive.
- Make it Viral / Word of Mouth – Connect with key influences / customers in your industry and make them spread the word. i.e. Retweet, Share, Like, Google +1’s etc.
- Customer Care – Social Media is fast becoming the future of customer service. You can help your customers with a support enquiry and other customers can help each other.
Example: I tweeted about how frustrated I was not being able to get a HP driver for my printer, even though I contacted them several times via phone and email. Within a few hours, a HP representative contacted me via Twitter to resolve my issue.
- Understand your customers’ needs – Receive customer feedback and understand the needs of potential customers through a customer feedback form, complaints form or survey.
Identifying Your Target Audience
Who is Your Audience?
Social media is all about connecting with others. First think about your target audience and study/learn about them.
It is important to understand how they contribute in social media and through which mediums. Social media users generally fall into the following categories:
- Creators: These users are responsible for publishing content such as blogs, websites, video, music etc.
- Conversationalists: Update their social networking site by updating their status & posting tweets
- Critics: Users who actively review and rate products. Make comments on blogs and contribute to content and online forums.
- Collectors: Users who vote on websites & add tags to photos.
- Joiners: These users create social media profiles on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Google Plus
- Spectators: They search the web reading blogs, watching videos on YouTube, reading forum posts and tweets.
- Inactives: Does not do any of the above.
Through surveys and other data, learn as much as you can about your target customers’ challenges, needs and wants. Use online survey tools such as Survey Monkey or User Report and read this article to learn more about creating an effective online survey. By knowing where your audience falls on the spectrum, you’ll have an easier time creating an effective social media strategy.
How to Proceed?
After determining a course of action, put it in writing. Make sure your entire team is on the same page.
In the meanwhile, make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.
Put Your Plan into Action
With the completion of the planning and assessing phase, you should be ready to implement your social media strategy. The key to doing so effectively is by using a content calendar. This is crucial for keeping you focused and your efforts on track. Assigning responsibility to tasks makes people accountable as well. I found this detailed content calendar (Free download) by Populate Digital. This calendar will specify the theme of the content that you will use in your campaign, when and where it is shared, who creates it and the mode of delivery.
To enhance your social media strategy, you should plan on using a variety of different tools. Use hootsuite for your social media management. Social media icons and plugins should be added to your website, e-commerce site and on content pages. Make it as easy as possible for someone to share and like your stuff. Promote your social media networks on company emails, letterheads, invoices, business cards and other places. Use promotions and contests/giveaways to engage your target audience and get them involved. Continually demonstrate what you have to offer.
Use paid advertising, such as StumpleUpon Paid Discovery or Facebook Advertising to promote your business outside your reach.
Tip: Make sure your social buttons on your website are visible. Tools such as ShareThis or AddThis are simple plugins that can add social buttons to your website.
Evaluate Your Success
You should give your social media strategy a little time to gain momentum; after about two or three months, you should perform an in-depth evaluation to determine whether your strategy is producing results or not. Specific metrics such as shares, likes, subscribers, click rates, sales that originated in social media channels and conversion rates should be analysed with care.
Tip: A free tool Google Alerts can help you monitor your brand keywords to listen to what people are saying about you.
If your efforts seem to be producing results, run with it. Don’t just rest on your laurels. Mix things up a little. Now is the time to roll out Facebook ads, live question-and-answer sessions, Google Hangouts and other webinars, contests that span across multiple social media outlets and more.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
To ensure the ongoing effectiveness of your social media strategy, go back to the beginning and start again. Lay out a new plan with new objectives based on fresh assessments. Implement a revised plan with updated goals. Evaluate its success by analysing specific metrics. By continually going through this cycle and building upon what you learn, you will be able to achieve incredible results through your social media marketing efforts.
05:09 0
18 May 2013
#INFOGRAPHIC: An Intro To #SEO
This Infographic is Published by BixaMedia
04:38 0
#INFOGRAPHIC: Optimise Your Social Network
This Infographic is Published by The Like Minded (UK)
04:34 0
#INFOGRAPHIC: Choosing the Most Effective Social Media Platforms
This Infographic is Published by Infographics.SG
04:28 0
17 May 2013
5 Useful Apps for Facebook Business Pages
Facebook marketing is a huge business and recently there have been massive changes taking place in the way pages for businesses are handled. You can promote your page using Facebook ads and sponsored stories. Apart from these paid campaigns, you can also enhance your Facebook business page by adding a few good apps. Previously on Facebook Pages, you could make a tab as the landing page to promote your business. After the timeline changes which present Facebook data to its users in a new format, you cannot set a tab as a landing page. But with a little customization, you can go even further than that.
Before talking about some useful apps for Facebook Business Pages, let me briefly explain how business owners can enhance their Facebook Pages with new timeline features.
Cover images for your Facebook Page – There is no doubt that cover images are the most noticeable aspect when people land on your Page. Use this space to represent your brand and welcome users to your Page. The minimum size for the cover image is 851x315 pixels. You can even use this space to encourage likes and announce new products, though be mindful of Facebook's restrictions.
Use this resource – 5 Websites to Find Facebook timeline cover images
Profile picture – Square shaped profile pictures fit exactly and this image will be shown at the top of your page slightly overlapping your cover shot and also will be used as thumbnail when interacting with Facebook as your page. You can either choose your brand logo or a brand icon as your profile picture so that you can be easily recognized.
5 essential apps for your brand’s Facebook page
If you’ve already been using Facebook for your business there is a good chance that you will have noticed big brands and companies using a landing page on their Facebook business page when people visits a page for the first time. You may have even set one up for yourself. But with the new timeline changes, you cannot setup landing pages. They’re dead.
This doesn’t mean you cannot create custom landing pages, but you cannot redirect when a user arrives to your page for the first time. You can still add custom content, opt in boxes and much more. You can also add apps in a new tab to your Facebook Business Page.
How can you direct the user to a specific app tab page? You can use Cover pictures in your page to direct users to click on the app tab page. For example: You can show arrows pointing the specific app tab page for promotional activities. By default the tabs on Facebook Business Pages come with Photos and Like Count. When you install an app, you can move them to last. Each business page can have up to 12 applications installed and 4 showing without any distraction.
All the apps can be re-arranged apart from the very first slot, which will always hold your Page's Photos. For everything else, you can simply re-arrange or edit the app settings by clicking on the pencil that appears in the top right of the image. You can even create custom images for these tabs. You need to create app images at 111 x 74 pixels. The images are used to represent your app and can also be used to add subtle directional hints towards the like button.
Static HTML is the largest provider of custom tabs on Facebook. You can create custom HTML pages containing anything. Just install the app and you will find welcome tab added to your Facebook page. Click the welcome tab and start editing.
Once you’ve installed the app, you have 5 core apps inside it to get started right away. HTML app to create HTML content, Image app to upload an image each for your public and fan content, you can use a page from your website to display includes resizing functionality. Business apps include a contact form where people can directly email you from the page. You can even add tabs inside the app.
As you all know Aweber is an excellent email subscription service with beautiful opt in forms. Use the Aweber web form tool app inside your Facebook page to collect email lists. It's a simple way to add your Aweber optin forms. If you’re announcing a giveaway for your Facebook fans, redirect them here to enter an email address to participate in the giveaway. This way all the email lists are collected within your Aweber account, one of the best ways to convert social media audiences into email subscribers. Follow this tutorial on Aweber to install the app smoothly.
The YouTube for Pages app shows all of your videos from your YouTube channel. If you are video blogging (vlogging) or helping people with content through videos, then this is a must have app for your Facebook Page. This is how it looks when installed on a Facebook Page: Sample page.
Once installed, fill in the name of a YouTube user or channel. You can display a set of videos by selecting a playlist of videos that you've created in your YouTube account or feature a video to be placed at the top of the page when the page initially loads.
If you use the Networked Blogs app to push your blog feeds to Facebook page automatically, you can use the app in your page tabs to display all your blog posts. I have been using RSS Grafiti to display all my blog posts on my own Facebook Page.
By adding the Sweepstakes app you can run contests within your Facebook Pages to capture likes and engage followers.
13:22 0
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