maine web development, web design, internet marketing

Social Media has become quite the darling of the new marketing world. Truth is, social media is an excellent way to connect with your current and potential customers (even in the B2B world). The problem is, many businesses can’t sift through what is social media hype and what is practical, usable advice for their business.

Early adopters flocked to it, blogged about it, tweeted it from their iPhones, updated, Buzzed and sung about it. Skeptics were not so convinced and wanted hard data and social media ‘experts’ recanted with fairy tales about saving businesses with absolutely no cost to your organization. Who do you believe? How do you participate, without wasting your valuable time?

What is social media hype?

Social media hype is the excitement when there is a new toy for social media lovers to play with. When something new comes out, they will blog about it and give you the story on why you NEED to be a part of this new online community, app or tool. It is easy to get wrapped up in social media hype but try to remember when the next social media tool comes out, they will recommend that as well and when another one comes out, they will recommend that too.

Do you have time to be on 40 social media sites and participate in 20 apps? I definitely don’t. There are major repercussions to spreading yourself too thin. It is better to be a part of 2 (or even 1) active community that respects your work and participates with your content than being a part of 20 networks that offer you no return.

Reality is when that excitement wears off and you find yourself using a tool to achieve your goals. A big part of figuring out what your social media reality will be is by determining what your actual goals are. Some social media goals could be more website traffic, increasing brand awareness, getting more qualified leads, assisting customer service, reputation management, increase attendance at live events, et al.

Social media is constantly changing. New tools and toys are always being created. Just because something is new doesn’t mean you need to be using it for your business. I recommend keeping a watchful eye on new tools and trends and test them but you should be choosing the right tools for the job, not the shiniest tool in the toolbox. What is going to help you achieve your goals that you can work into your already busy schedule?

What is driving you?

Are you driven by marketing your company, building relationships and being held accountable for what you are going to say? Or are you driven by being a social media star? Sounds like a silly question, but it isn’t. Many people seem more driven by the number of Twitter followers they have over the amount of qualified leads they are getting. If you are using social media as a business tool you should be tracking how your efforts are affecting your business and not how your social media efforts are affecting your social media profiles.

Will using social media help you achieve your marketing goals? Not your neighbor’s goals, your competitor’s goals or some national big brand’s goals but does it help with your businesses goals? Are you motivated by the same social media case studies we hear all the time – or are you driven by the results you are seeing for yourself?

Some suggestions for not drowning in social media hype

• If you feel like you are forcing it, you probably are. What were you doing before the dawn of social media and what made your company unique? Social media is just new tools to do the same things we were doing before. Learning new technology can be a bit tricky but the esscence of your social media landscape should be an extension on aspects of your business you were already doing.
• Listen to a few qualified business professionals. Instead of following all the social media mavens, choose a few that you trust and share common business goals with and let them guide you on trends that are worth trying out, like having an internet marketing travel agent.
• Forget the social media experts, find great businesses that know how to use social media. The world doesn’t need social media ‘experts’ as much as it needs real businesses using social media well. You will probably find more value in the practical use of social media over the suggestions from a social media expert who may just be regurgitating information they read in a book or blog. Just because someone declares themselves as a social media expert doesn’t mean they have any experience making actual successful business campaigns.
• Know what you are trying to achieve first. Have a business strategy for what you want to use social media for. Then decide the tools that will help you achieve those goals. The most basic elements of a strategy is figuring out where to play and how you are going to win. For business we rely heavily on LinkedIn for market research, keeping up with trends in our industry and building our online network. We use Twitter and Facebook to help get our content out and interact with our customers, experts and peers. Some smaller social media networks and new apps are being tested by individual staff members but we still haven’t integrated them into our company marketing because we don’t have a place for them yet and that is OK.

Social media is exciting. It does level the playing field for some small businesses. It can be a great lead generation and relationship building tool. How you use social media tools is up to you and your business. Try to spend more time using what works for your company and less time following the social media hype.

Many businesses have realized that social media marketing is an important tool to have in their marketing tool belt. One of the problems businesses have, SMBs in particular, is that there are just not enough hours in the day to add more things to do, monitor, listen to, update, post, blog et. al. Most SMBs don’t have marketing departments, copywriters or the extra manpower to add more work to do by participating in this rapidly changing online social landscape.

Using this space and using it well is tough to do. Twitter alone is raw and happening at rapid tweets per second. A major part of using Twitter well for your business is making sure you have a loyal, interested and active list of people you are following and who are following you. Remember, this is networking not broadcasting. It is usually better to have a small active Twitter following who reads, reacts and republishes your content versus having thousands of followers but none of them contribute to your effort.

Each morning as I drink my coffee, I check for any new followers on my Twitter accounts (@Hall_Web and @amanda_pants). I manually (that is by hand not a plugin or bot that follows back anyone who is following me) check each new follower.

I look at lots of things when determining whether or not to follow someone back and with a collection of all the information, I make my decision.

Here is what I look for before following back a new follower:

• Avatar or image – Does the person have a picture? Is that picture of them, their face, a logo?
• Location – Is the person from my geographic location? Are they from someplace I have lived, traveled to, am interested in, do business in?
• Recent Tweets – What kind of content do they publish? Are they conversational or are they simply broadcasting?
• Number of Followers and Following – Do they have tens of thousands of followers? Unless they are super important or famous, they probably used some type of bot of following scheme to garner so many followers.
• Twitter lists – How many are they listed on and what topics are they listed for?

Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are pretty new. When they were first rolled out, not many people knew what to do with them, some thought they would hurt already standing Twitter traditions and some just plain old didn’t like them. Since the dust has settled, I have found Twitter lists very useful in determining if I am going to follow someone on Twitter.

First – How many lists are they on? The act of creating a list and adding people you want to it takes time. Someone took enough time to create this list and categorize this person because they wanted to organize or bookmark this person’s information. Time = Value in my mind. A human being took the time to categorize my content. I think that is a big deal. I have looked around and if you can get 5-10% of your followers to add you to a list, I think that is pretty good.

Second – What lists in particular are they on? Consider what lists people are on. Is their expertise something you are hoping to learn more about? Are they in your industry, local market, attending an event you are attending? Or perhaps they could just clog your Twitter stream with information you are not looking for.

This is also a good way to monitor your own Twitter content. If you consider yourself a Social Media Expert and you are being listed as an SEO expert, you could be sending people the wrong message (or tweets). If you are an HR Blogger and people are listing you as social media expert, whiskey connoisseur, running blogger and the list goes on and on, you could be sending mixed messages. By talking about all of your interests you may have diluted your message.

This is just one way I try to keep my Twitter efforts organized and make sure I am following and being followed by good people. I want both parties to benefit from this relationship. What other precautions or tips do you have for streamlining your Twitter efforts?

Facebook keeps getting bigger and if your target audience is using it, now’s a good time to get involved in the discussions about your company and industry! We’ve learned how to setup a profile, now we need something to look at – something to allure users. Let’s add some boxes to your Fan page, shall we?

Wait, what’s a box?

A box is an user developed application where you can display image galleries, twitter feeds, blog feeds, videos and many other useful marketing materials to better engage your fans or potential fans. These boxes require the use of FBML. FBML is a coding language that lets you custom build these Facebook Platform apps. An evolved version of HTML, Facebook Developers community has listed allowed FBML and HTML tags to use. So if you know HTML, FBML is not too far off.

1. Access your edit dashboard by clicking “Edit Page” below your profile photo.
2. Scroll all the way down and click on “Browse More” under “More applications”
3. This will take you to the Applications landing page, in the top left corner in the search bar type “Static FBML”
4. Click on the logo on the right and when you get to the “Static FBML” Fan page click “add to my page” below the logo
5. There will be a dialog box of all of your fan pages (maybe you have only one!) Click “Add To Page” for whatever page you would like to display

Here it is visually:

Editing your new Static FBML box

Now we actually have the “Boxes” tab added to your Fan page profile, we can see it in the tab navigation if you go back to it. Now we want to put actual content within the box! Go back to your Fan page dashboard under “Edit Page” and notice that there is a new box that says “FBML – FBML” This is your first Box.

There are 4 options for this box;

• Edit (This is where you can change the name of your box and develop inside of it using HTML and FBML)
• Application settings (You can remove the box, add a new tab to your navigation or create additional permissions to publish all of your recent activity to your wall feed)
• Link To This Tab (Clicking this will display the direct URL to your tab *Remember this for later in the blog series!*)
• Remove Application (not much to say here)

If you click the Edit link, It will take you to a page with inputs where you can implement application development. Displayed is a Box Title, the title that will be displayed on that particular box on the boxes page, as well as the input for “FBML” or the code of what will display in that particular box.

We are going to display a video within a box. Within your FBML input text box, input the following


<strong>"Fancy Title Goes Here" </strong><br><br><center><fb:swf swfbgcolor="ffffff" imgstyle="border-width:3px; border-color:white;" imgsrc="url of your image to display" swfsrc='url of your video' width='numeric value of what your width is' height='numeric value of what your height is' /><br />click image to start video</center>

This is going to display one video of your choice…notice the similarities between FBML and HTML!

When you are finished, you can click “Save Changes” at the bottom and return back to your fan page and go to the “Boxes” tab to view your new page application.

Congratulations! This is now something you can promote on your wall or other social media outlets/blog!

We have been talking about Social Media a lot here over the last few years. We have covered tips on your strategy, tools and measuring. There is something I am not sure we have covered in depth yet… succeeding in social media and getting truck loads of business from it takes a lot of work.

Kasi and I are training for a half marathon in April, neither of us consider ourselves runners but we made it a goal to achieve during these cold winter months. We are following a formal half marathon training program. Up until now, the training has been relatively easy – running 3 days a week 3-4 miles each time. We got that down! From this week forward it starts getting really hard, more running and longer distances.

Running 3-4 miles 3-4 times a week can be done with little effect on my daily life. You can do that time on a lunch break, before work, after work, you can miss a day and make it up the next etc. If our goal was to only be people who ran 3-4 miles at a time we could rest comfortably right here without making any additional effort that would never really cause us any discomfort but, that is not what our goal was/is. Our goal is to run a whole half marathon (13.1 miles).

To complete our goal we need to really schedule our runs, keep track of time and pace, plan meals accordingly, as these runs get worse longer – we need to schedule recovery time and in some cases full half days need to be blocked off. This is going to be hard work from here on in.

Really succeeding at social media is work

Like our 3-4 mile running program, if you just want to be seen on social media and dabble you can sign up for Twitter, make a Facebook fan page, join LinkedIn, etc. If the goal for your business is to really succeed in social media (the whole 13.1 miles), you can’t just join social networks and wait for something to happen.

To really succeed at Social Media you need to:

• Set concrete goals and milestones for your social media presence (make a million dollars with social media is not a good goal to have here). You need actual tangible goals and to set a time-line for tracking your progress to these goals.
• Schedule time each day you are going to participate in this space. Social Media cheerleaders will tell you how great social media is and it is free. Signing up for most social media sites is free but it takes time to use them effectively. If you are going to be available 3 days in a row and regularly striking up conversations with your network, what happens when you take the next four days off? You need to set expectation for what people will get from a relationship with your business online and you need to stick to those or you will leave a trail of confused and possibly frustrated people online trying to keep a conversation with you going.
• Be dedicated to seeing this through and making it work. You are not going to be an overnight success. This is going to take time. You need time to build trust with your network and make useful connections online.
• You may need to reallocate resources and cut what is standing in your way. As with our running example, if I have a 12 mile run on Saturday – it is going to affect what I do on Friday. I may not be able to attend social events Friday evenings because they will conflict with the milestone I have to meet the next day. You may need to reallocate resources, personnel and more to make sure your needs are being met in this online space.
• Track what is working and what is not. Keep track of what you are doing online and see what is working and what is not. If something is not working (a specific site is showing no inbound links to your website, no one is interacting with your content et. al), then stop wasting your time in that space.

Social media is great. It is a really neat space that I am happy to be a part of. It has helped many businesses with their online marketing. Social Media has helped people find jobs, experts, answers, relationships, business partners, vendors and more. The real true people who are finding success with social media are actually working really hard. This didn’t just happen by accident. So let’s set up the Twitter account, Facebook page, LinkedIn group and blog but then let’s really get down to business…