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Sunday, December 2, 2012

10 Tactics for More Traffic Getting Tweets

Twitter is a fun and engaging social network site that was launched in 2006 and has since earned its way into the top ten most visited sites. With Twitter, you can post short text messages called tweets. As of 2012 Twitter has over 500 million users and several million tweets are posted per day. When used properly Twitter can be an effective marketing tool for your business.

However, we've all seen such tweets as "Watching Shrek tonight with the kids and having popcorn." Tweets like these are not effective in building a business network. Learning to write more effective tweets will help you expand your networking circle and in doing so, help you build a more successful business.

1. Keep it Short and Simple - Although Twitter allows you 140 characters per post studies have shown that smaller posts are more effective. Tweets with less than 100 characters are more successful with 80 character tweets being the optimum length. Shorter posts have a greater chance of being retweeted as well.

2. Use Hashtags Carefully - Using hashtags will help categorize your tweets to help them show up in searches. This will allow your tweet to work much more efficiently. Simply use the pound sign in front of your targeted word or phrase like so: #ebooks. Using hashtags sparingly can be effective but overusing them is more like spam and will likely do more harm than good. Studies have shown that using more than two hashtags per tweet decreased the tweet's effectiveness.

3. Maximum Punch for More Clicks - You only have so much space and time for your tweets so you have to write them like attention-grabbing headlines. They must have punch to get people to notice and then click your link. Use the most powerful words that will pull readers in. Take note of which tweets get your attention and how they are written. Take a little time to practice writing your tweets before posting.

4. Don't Always Be Selling - Social networking is for making connections and building relationships, not just selling. If all you do is try to sell your products through your tweets, you will not get much response. Offer resources, helpful information, interesting tidbits, etc. Useful content will get attention, not just ads.

5. Tweet When the Time is Right - Certain days and certain times of the day can be more effective for tweeting. You need to find out the best time for your followers. Tweriod is a free Twitter tool that can give you a detailed report of the best time of days and what days you should tweet for maximum results.

6. Where to Place Your Link - A detail as small as where you place your link within your tweet can make a difference on the impact the tweet makes. Most people tend to put their link at the end of the post but reports have shown this is not the most effective placement. Research shows that your link will get the highest CTR (click-thru rate) when placed ¼ of the way into your tweet. Links will work at the end of the tweet but not as much as when placed at the first quarter. The second most effective placement would be in the 98% area of the tweet. You can read more details in the report by Dan Zarella. He did this study based on 200,000 random tweets with links.

7. Twitter Specials - Offer your followers something they can only get on Twitter. People like to feel appreciated and offering them an exclusive deal can sometimes do the trick.

8. Be Consistent - Just as with your blog, you need to provide fresh content for your readers. Don't just tweet once and not come back for weeks. This will not help build trust or reliability. Update your account on a regular schedule and be consistent.

9. Add Personality - The purpose of social networking is to get to know people, make connections and build relationships so you need to let people know you by allowing your personality to show through in your tweets. Get to know your followers and post information they will be interested in. Add some appropriate fun and humor along with helpful resources and pertinent information. Be helpful, positive, professional, fun and appreciative!

10. As Always, Use Proper Grammar and Spelling - Use correctly spelled complete words when tweeting for your business. Do not use u for you or ur for your or you're. Be sure to use proper grammar as well. Always write professionally and correctly.

Twitter and other social networking sites can do a lot for your business but you need to utilize them correctly and completely to get the maximum benefits.

Top Reasons to Engage on Twitter How Are You Leveraging Your LinkedIn Groups to Build Your Empire? How Online Social Networks Help Build Businesses 3 Drawbacks of Online Social Networking For Business What Is Instagram? Social Internet Marketing The Right Way

The Two Things That Influenced Social Media Privacy

Social media privacy is influenced by two things in the world. One of them is offline friendships and the second thing is the existing Pay per Click channels. These two things affected how the social networks set themselves up and how they would do business in the future. The offline friendships gave the social networks the free model that they needed to generate the user base, and the Pay per Click systems taught the social networks how to monetize that model.

The original social networks were run by college kids that were only interested in staying in contact with each other. They knew each other well and knew each other's friends. They knew if a person liked the other person then their network would probably be a good base of people to know as well. There would be familiarity and those people in their network may end up being good friends too if they met. This meant that the social networks allowed everyone to view everyone else's friends because that gave them the best chance to grow their database of friends and have more relationships.

However, this does not work in the real world. These sites became popular and started to be used for networking purposes. This meant people would add other people into their networks that they did not necessarily know well, but they wanted to have contact with in the future. They also had business contacts in their profiles that other business people should not see (because they were a secret provider of X and if every competitor knew about how to get X, they would put that business out of business). This means that the social networks are not well made for business purposes.

The existing Pay Per click channels added the structure for monetization. The social networking systems and the search engines have two things in common. They offer a free service and they offer an advertising model based on that service. The free service may be the most useful part of the system. It definitely drives the Pay per Click side of the business because the people who use the free part of the system are the people who the businesses want to reach on the systems. Social media is no different; they have a wide base of active people on their system that the business owner wants to reach. Therefore, the social networks copied the monetization methods of the search engines.

However, the search engines never could get as much information as the social media systems. The social media systems have the advantage that they were built for personal relationships. Therefore, people on the social networks are accustomed to releasing the information to the social network. This is not true on the search engines, because the paradigm is different. The people on a search engine are looking for a solution, on the social networks they are looking to be entertained and to socialize with friends. This dynamic alone makes it difficult for the search engines to get as much information as the social media systems can and do get from their users.

These two things influenced how social media would be used in the future and how they monetized their system. However, the friendship model was the most important piece of influence because it influenced how the default settings worked on the social networking systems. The setting is usually set to let everyone see the profile no matter who they are (friend, family, or complete stranger). Therefore, this is what influenced social media privacy the most.

How to Use Social Media Privacy to Make More Money

The fact of the social media systems is that they are trying to gather as much information about a person as possible. However, a smart marketer uses this to their advantage because they are able to see how the social system targets their users through social media use. A marketer that uses a social system should know everything about how a social media system will target their target market.

Obviously, the first thing to do is to start a new profile to release information with the intention of seeing how the social system targets the advertisements to that profile. This means that the social user's intentionally giving up information that may or may not be false with the intention of deriving information about how the social system will work in the future for their business.

This is a very smart idea because a marketer who understands how a social media system markets their product is a person who can predict how much they will spend and how effective that spending will be on the social media system. This allows them to make judgment calls on how effective the social media system will be for the business in the future and whether or not the social media systems are appropriate for the businesses use.

This new profile is the key because a social user should not use their social media profile. This is because that will bring him or her closer to buying something on impulse that they would not have gotten before using the social media system. The new profile protects the user from making impulse buys while testing the system to see how effective it will be for the business.

If anything is the key to advertising on the Internet or in real life, it is the ability of a marketer to test a system before they roll it out to the general populace. The social networking systems are no different. This is because the system can be tested for effectiveness and therefore they can be tested to see if they will deliver a favorable result for that particular marketer.

Understanding a social system as much as possible before using the system is a very smart idea. This will give the marketer an idea of what to expect when advertising on the system. Most marketers do not know what to expect when using the social networking system, therefore, they are not prepared for the situations that arise when using a social system. A marketer who takes the time to use the system before they market on the system is better off than those who do not take the time.

In conclusion, it is smart to make the time to learn about a social system before using the social system to advertise. The people who take the time to do this are far more prepared than those people who do not take the time to get ready to use the social media systems. Therefore, a marketer should always try to learn as much about the system they are going to use before they have to use it.

How Interviewing Experts Helps SEO and Social Media Marketing Efforts

Interviewing experts helps build the credibility of the business. This is because interviewing experts helps show that the business is interested in getting the highest amount of good information possible for their clients and themselves as well.

To make a good impression in social media marketing, interview experts and influential individuals within the niche and post videos of the interviews on YouTube. Not only is this going to be interesting to those on the site, but if a person shows that they have an association with those that are respected in their field, they will grow in reputation by default. Inspiring customer credibility and confidence helps sell more of the company's products and services.

Even though people do not think about it, video sites are social media sites. In fact, video sharing sites might be some of the first social networks in existence. Therefore, the use of videos in social sharing sites is a good thing. Therefore, a business that can come up with relevant videos and post them on social sharing sites may experience a rapid growth in their social media follower list. All that the business needs to do is refer them to their social media profile and most of the people who are interested will follow (or friend) the social media profile as needed.

A business may also interview an expert and allow the audience to participate through a webinar or a phone interview. The interview should be presentation based and only allow questions and answers at a particular time. The best thing to do is to have the questions moderated so that the attendees cannot hijack the call for their own purposes (i.e. pitch their own business in middle of the webinar).

Another place where traditional social media could be useful is attracting an audience to the interview. The social media systems are great at advertising and generating attendees to events because the events are social in nature themselves. This means that the social media user is transferring from one social media platform to another and this generally increases the conversion of a social media user to an attendee of an event quickly and easily.

In closing, there are many uses to interviewing an expert because of the many benefits that interview will give the interviewer in the long run. Not only will the interview generate more publicity for the interviewer and interviewee, it also gives them another asset to load on to a social networking video site. Therefore, they have another asset to rank on the first page of the search engines. This means that they can knock other users off the first page of a keyword if properly targeted. It also can serve to defend the brand when another user uses a video to try to release an attack on the business itself. Therefore, this interview is not only a great way to generate interest and authority. It also has SEO applications that even stretch to the ability of the website to defend itself in the end. Therefore, an interview is always a good thing for a business to schedule and execute.

What Needs To Be Ready For A Social Networking For Business Campaign to Succeed

A business owner needs to be ready for the amount of chatter that comes from entering the social networking realm. If the social media realm is about anything, it is about the amount of chatter that a business or person is able to post on the site. This chatter is anything from questions about a product or service or straight heckling of those products and services. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that anyone who runs a social networking campaign needs to have thick skin to run his or her campaign effectively.

Many leading marketing experts say that if a business does not have enemies than it does not stand for anything. The truth about social media is that any post that is not set to private (an important factor for any business social networking platform) is subject to scrutiny by the community who uses a certain social media platform. The business owner and the person who is assigned to the social networking campaign must have thick skins. This is because those hecklers who are the social networks are trying to get the business owner or person assigned to the campaign to take the insults personally. However, the ability to manage the those feelings is important (as well as the ability to remove those comments through the social networking platform so they are not a distraction for other companies or individuals trying to make a buying decision).

The person running the social networking campaign also needs to be properly trained to handle the campaign as well. One of the biggest mistakes that a manager or business owner can make is the assignment of a social networking campaign to a person who has no training to run the campaign effectively. Social networking is an art form and takes a certain kind of etiquette to be effective. What most people do when first starting a social media campaign is to try to gain as many followers as they can in a short period of time. However, this is rarely ever effective for developing new business contacts. Many of the people who a business can "friend" or "follow" are actually not people, they are what are called "bots" in marketing communities. They are really computer programs that pull down lists of users and add them to their "friend" or "follow" lists. These bots hope that real users will "follow" or "friend" them back. Trying to gain a following that is large from the start is the wrong approach to social networking. This approach is also is rarely ever effective.

A social media manager also should be skilled at "pacing" other users. This means that the user of social media should be able to match the language of other users in the system. The ability to speak like other users increases the chances of the business to develop real relationships that are beneficial for the business. The inability to do this can cause a business to not to able to relate to the community. Therefore, the business will be ignored by the target market and effectively be tuned out by the community.

A business should never take an employee and put them in front of a computer to manage the social networking campaign. There are many nuances that a person needs to know before they are able to effectively run a campaign. This person needs to have thick skin and the ability to mimic the speech patterns of the target market on the social networks. A person who has these qualities can be very effective at leading and generating revenue from social media programs.

Local Vs National Social Networking For Business

Many people want to know if it is better to focus on local or national social networking for business. The truth about this is that it depends on what the goals of the company. However, there are downsides and upsides to focusing on both approaches. Each can be effective, but the timing of each method really depends on what state the business is in at the moment that the decision is made that they should join the social networks.

In general, it is better for a company to focus on the local area first. This is because the company can catch the low hanging fruit in their business. There is far less competition in the local area than the whole world. This allows a business to train in a small pond before they invest a lot of time and money in competing with the big boys in a market place. Too many businesses try to be larger than their skill level allows them. This causes them to lose a lot of money in advertising. This is no different than testing a message in direct mail. A message can be sent to a very small portion of the list. This allows a business to get an idea of the effectiveness of the ad before they jump into the deep end with both feet. This is the smartest strategy that a business can take before they spend a lot of money in a market that may not be profitable.

One of the problems with marketing to a smaller town is that the town may not have the statistical relevance necessary to make an educated guess. This lack of relevance makes it very hard to test a message. There is a major search engine that says that 1000 actions are needed before statistical relevance is achieved. However, this is not possible in some markets because a person may only get 20 visitors a day. These visitors may not click anything, which means that it could take years to finally get to that 1000 action threshold. This is a massive problem that should be considered before a business makes the choice to be local first.

The solution may not be to be national, however. Even though the pool is larger, it takes skill to manage the amount of clicks that can come into a server. The competition is also much stiffer and a company may never generate much traffic unless the person managing the campaign is a master of driving social media traffic. A business can also experience explosive growth where the business cannot keep up the demand placed on them. This is a massive problem that should be avoided.

The real answer to this question depends on where the business is before it enters the social media platforms. There are pros and cons to targeting the local area and the national area. However, it is always smart to start small and work up from there. This allows a business to learn the pitfalls in their marketing message and allows them the business owner to make changes as needed.