Seven strategies to stay ahead of overwhelming social media change
Nov 18th
Can we have an honest conversation among friends?
Trying to keep up with social media is overwhelming!
Little wonder. We are living in the middle of an unprecedented frenzy of change.
When was the last time there was an innovation in television that impacted the way we marketed? 1975 – cable TV, and now, arguably, the move toward asynchronous viewing on mobile devices. If you do a lot of print advertising, the fundamentals have been the same since the advent of the printing press in 1450!
But social media? Not only do the social media platforms shift every day, the rules of engagement are changing constantly, too. Can anybody on earth keep up with the real and rumored changes just to Facebook’s EdgeRank formula?
What we considered best practices six months ago are passe’ today. Yes, social media is overwhelming, especially when there is pressure to master every new platform that comes along.
But as a professional marketer, you must keep up. How is this possible? Here are seven ideas to help you stay calm and carry on.
Master the marketing fundamentals. The most effective coping mechanism for me has been having deep experience in marketing fundamentals. Yes, the platforms keep changing, but the basics of marketing and consumer behavior don’t. So if you can view technological change through the lens of marketing fundamentals, you can more easily weed out the stuff that just isn’t going to make it. If you’re serious about a career in social media marketing, focus on learning the “marketing” part.
Form a support group. You can’t possibly keep up with everything and neither can your friends. But together, you can make a dent in it. I have a few trusted friends who are more techy or more SEO-y than me. Together we can help each other by discussing the latest trends over lunch once a month. This gives me just enough juice to be at least be conversant in a topic.
Consider a focus area. This is a hard thing to think about, but maybe you CAN’T keep up with everything and you need to focus on specialties. I’m starting to see consultants specialize in LinkedIn, Facebook, and video marketing and that’s probably a smart idea because you have a chance to be an expert in at least one thing. I am struggling with this first, because I teach survey college courses so I have to know something about everything. And frankly, I am having a hard time focusing because I don’t want to miss anything. Everything is interesting to me.
Go where your customers are. Look, maybe it’s time to give up on Path or even (gasp) Google+ and simply stay on top of the platforms relevant to your customers.
Give yourself a time limit. Are you reading social media blog posts in bed? Maybe it’s time for a self-imposed time limit to force yourself to focus and prioritize.
Eliminate engagement guilt. Here is a hard lesson I have had to come to terms with: The more successful you are, the less ability you have to engage with your fans and followers. I hate that. But if I tried to maintain the level of engagement I had even a year ago I would not just be overwhelmed, I would be insane. As your tribe builds, you simply have to adjust and come to grips that with the fact that you have a life beyond social media. Some thing are going to slip through the cracks. Allow that to be OK.
The curation answer … or not. Now an obvious idea to keep up with social media trends is to go to a highly-respected curated source of content on key social media developments. Here’s the problem (and a business opportunity). This does not exist, at least not any place that meets my needs. Mashable? Too much crap. Social Media Examiner? An excellent site but too much of a focus on “how-to” posts.
Where do you guys go for your one-stop shopping for a manageable amount of social media tech and business highlights? Besides {grow} of course? (wink) How are you coping with the amount of change in this field?
8 Indispensable Tools to Improve Your Social Media Efficiency
Nov 1st
By {grow} Community Member Ian Cleary
Being organized with your social media efforts is essential because it can be so time consuming.
It’s easy to spend many hours on social media but are you using that time effectively?
Here are 8 tools that I use on a regular basis that helped me be more effective and efficient on social media and hopefully it will help you too!
1. Monitor and Build Relationships on Twitter with Commun.it
Commun.it provides functionality to help build and monitor relationships with Twitter followers. I only need to spend a couple of minutes a day on Commun.it but it gives me some valuable actionable information, such as:
- Influencers who have interacted with me but I haven’t reciprocated.
- Suggested people to follow
- Opportunities to engage with people based on keywords that I’m tracking (e.g. my company name
- Identify people who are sharing my content that I should reciprocate by sharing their content
Figure 1 Influencers Sharing out My Content that I should engage with
2. Market Your Content Using Triberr
Triberr is a community of bloggers who help promote each other’s content by sharing it out on social networks.
Members join tribes and these tribes are based around particular topics and values. There is a high value placed on supporting fellow bloggers and providing value!
When you login you can see all the latest posts from tribe members and then you can easily share it out across a variety of networks.
In the example below there is an article from Jim Dougherty that has been shared out 11 times so far. When I read the article I just click on the approve button to share out on Twitter if I think my audience would benefit from the article.
If you join the right tribe it can be a great source of content to share and you can learn a lot from your community members.
3. Track the Influencer Blogs Using Google Reader
Google Reader is a useful tool for reading blog posts from many bloggers in one place instead of visiting individual websites. If you’re organized enough using Google Reader you can get through a lot of content quite quickly.
One great tip I picked up from Kristi Hynes was to use the Twitter name as the name of your blog feed. This means that when you read a piece of content that you want to share, you immediately have the Twitter name ready so you don’t have to look it up.
How many times have you searched around for a Twitter user name before you can share out some content?
4. Find Great Content Using Bottlenose
Bottlenose is a tool for tracking news and trends across social networks. I’m passionate about “social media tools” so I like to track conversations about tools on social networks. Bottlenose provides me with relevant information on this topic.
I can filter out information based on a topic I’m interested in and see the latest news related to that topic, tweets and trending topics related to that area on Twitter.
5. Tidy Up Using ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter helps you identify people to follow and unfollow and provides analytics on your account.
I mainly use the unfollow functionality. It can identify people you are following who are not following you back and then categorize them so you can identify the obvious ones to unfollow. For example:
- Followers tweeting in a language not native to you
- People who follow a lot of people but don’t get many followers
- People who are not active on Twitter
- People who are tweeting too much
6. Share Content With BufferApp
BufferApp provides a very easy way to share content in the most effective way. When you come across an interesting article you click on the ‘buffer’ button in your browser and a tweet is created and put into a queue.
It then goes out on the next available time slot which you set up.
This is very useful because I may come across 10 articles at one time worth sharing but there’s no point in sharing them all at the same time. Also, it may not be the most appropriate time to share it out.
One tip I got from my friend Nate Riggs is to use Socialflow to work out the best times to send out a tweet. So Bufferapp with Socialflow is a great combination!
7. Analyze Results Using Google Analytics
After all our social media activity we generally want to drive relevant traffic to our website. Google Analytics provides very relevant information related to this:
- Social Traffic- Google provides me details on where traffic is coming from
- Goals- When traffic does arrive from social media channels I want to track this to see what conversion I’m getting. It’s great getting traffic but if it’s not converting then we’re wasting our time. Tracking goals is a very quick way of seeing if we’re making progress.
8. Launch It All Using Bookmarks!
I don’t like to spend my day opening and closing all these applications. So a very simple tip is to bookmark all the tools in one folder and then you can open them up in one go!!!
Bookmarking is available with all browsers and it’s a simple way of keeping track of websites that you want to visit again.
By putting the bookmarks into a folder I can open them all in one go. On Safari this creates a tab for every application.
I’m always looking for useful new ideas and apps? Will you share your favorite in the comment section?
Ian Cleary is a Social Media Tools Specialist. He is the founder of Razorsocial, a website that provides sharp insights on social media tools. Follow Ian on twitter @ianmcleary
Six ways to create great content in just 15 minutes a day
Jun 10th
Let’s face it. Content development can be a complicated, time-consuming, and expensive proposition! So I started thinking about this in the context of my friends and small business customers who simply can’t afford that kind of effort. It led to this idea: micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content when you don’t have time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook.
Let’s examine ideas about using micro-content for your social media strategy, assuming you are testing the water and only have 15 minutes a day to devote to this activity. Hey, I’m up for a challenge!
Preparation
Like any marketing initiative, you must have a firm idea of your strategy, selling points, and target audience. Spend time thinking through a set of keywords that represent your business and your customer needs. You’ll need to weave these keywords into your micro-content initiative. Once you have a firm idea of “your story,” here are some content marketing options that work in just 15 minutes a day:
1) Slideshare
Even the most content-starved companies have PowerPoint slides! Upload your best public presentations to Slideshare for a very quick and effective way to begin populating the social web with meaningful content. Slideshare is highly indexed by the search engines and you can assign key words to every presentation. Make sure your last slide directs a viewer back to your website. The time to upload an existing presentation? Less than 10 minutes.
2) LinkedIn forums
LinkedIn is a goldmine of opportunity to create micro-content!
There are about 750,000 LinkedIn Groups covering every imaginable business interest. Go to the “search” function at the top of the page, highlight “groups” and look for a few that have like-minded people who might be interested in you. If you are in a very specialized field, you may even consider starting your own interest group.
Now, look through the Q&A forums and get involved. Simply answering questions is providing meaningful content that can attract attention to you and your website. I’ve made some fantastic connections this way and acquired two great customers just by answering questions in LinkedIn Group Forums.
Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and helpful so people can learn about you when they “click” on you! Depending on your industry, spending 15 minutes a day participating in relevant LinkedIn forums can be very profitable.
3) Networking on Twitter
This is the ultimate site for making connections through micro-content. In this separate post, I’ve provided some helpful ideas on building a targeted audience through Twitter. It makes no sense to work on micro-content on Twitter if you have nobody listening! Here is a suggested micro-content regimen if you’re just starting to tweet.
1) Create a habit of sharing — Today, every article, post and video has a “tweet” button. When you read something that interests you, share it on Twitter. It takes but a moment.
2) Leverage your network — If you’ve surrounded yourself with interesting people, they’re providing a stream of relevant content. When you find something great, re-tweet it! You don’t have to generate everything yourself. ”Re-purposing” other people’s content takes almost no time all.
3) Try following the “3 x 3 x 3 rule” — If you’re new and trying to figure what to do, tweet three times a day, at three different times of the day, on three different subjects: a) interesting non-work-related information you saw, heard or read; b) news related to your business, market or industry (use keywords), and c) your opinion on an item in the news or something funny.
Remember that micro-content is still supposed to do the job of big content — drive people to action on your website. Of course you need to include your website in your profile and use your keywords in your bio.
Don’t be overwhelmed by the wall of noise on Twitter. Use lists to focus on your most important contacts so your 15 minutes of daily networking are well-spent.
4) Connecting Through Comments
Spending 15 minutes a day commenting on relevant blog posts, videos, and Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to deliver micro-content that packs a punch. Here are some examples:
- A small business owner I advised commented on a magazine’s Facebook site and was invited to send her product to the editor for coverage.
- Adding your comment to relevant YouTube viral videos can create impressions with thousands of people who are interested in a related topic.
- My comment on a popular blog post contained a link to my website which is still receiving hits nine months later. That’s not unusual since posts on popular topics can have a long “shelf life.”
- Comments on my blog have resulted in new business partnerships, guest blogs, and freelance assignments for my readers.
I find that comments can carry even more impact when they’re “micro.” People will read a few sentences, but probably just scan a few paragraphs. Are there blogs that your customers enjoy? Why not contribute to this rich content with your own comments?
5) Micro-video
Videos are just so hot right now but you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars and precious hours in the editing booth to create great content.
I carry my $150 Kodak HD video camera with me everywhere I go. Recently, I gave a speech at an innovative new center for entrepreneurship in Chicago. I whipped out my camera and did a four-minute interview with the director. After I uploaded it to YouTube (for free), I embedded it on my blog (the embed code is under the “share” button on every YouTube video).
Voila! With 15 literally minutes worth of work, I had interesting content for my blog — which fed my Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, G+ stream, and LinkedIn status.
6) Micro-content and blogging
There are so many great benefits to blogging but this is usually the place time-starved marketers stumble. Think about re-purposing micro-content on your website as a blog, even if it only happens once a month:
- Cut and paste answers you’ve already provided on LinkedIn and blog comments as new, unique posts.
- Start a blog post with, “I found this interesting article through a link on Twitter …” and share the great content from one of your tweets.
- Embed a pre-existing company video or a Slideshare presentation as an original blog post.
- Share a relevant article, video or blog post from a trade publication and simply write a few sentences commenting on it.
A blog post does not have to be a PhD thesis. Using some of these techniques, you can literally create blog posts in 15 minutes.
In summary …
These are just a few of the ways you can effectively network on the social web with a “sprinkle” of content instead of a flood. Obviously there are hundreds of other ideas, but this is at least a start — even if you only have 15 minutes a day.
How you are using small nuggets of content to support your time-starved marketing strategy?
Take the Mystery Out of Twitter!
, the best-selling Twitter book in the world! Learn the three elements behind every Twitter success, 22 ways to build a relevant audience, strategies to create personal and business benefits, and hundreds of amazing tips and time-savers.Click on the image for a Special Amazon promotion!
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
Groups We Believe In
