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Archive for the ‘Social Media Strategy’ Category

FTC Shopping Guidelines

One of my favorite discussions is how to develop a strategy for using social media marketing to attract new clients and keep your existing ones.

If you have a blog or a website, are you utilizing search engine optimization to its fullest extent?  With the WordPress platform, there are several plugins available that help you with SEO. One of my favorites is “All-in-One SEO”. With All-in-One SEO you have additional information to fill out at the bottom of the publishing tool where you write your posts. You tell it the title of your post, a short (161 character) description of what your post is about (if you have done a good job with SEO for your first couple of sentences, that wil be your description), and lastly you need to put in your keywords.  If you have researched prior to writing your post (whether in a key word search engine or Google), you will have a list of keywords, and the highest demand words should be entered first and all the rest after that.

Also don’t forget to take the first few sentences of your post and copy/paste them into the excerpt section which is directly below where you write your posts.  This is what people will see if they catch only the excerpt of your post and can be important in getting them to read the entire post.  If you have gone to all the trouble to write a post, you want the world to find it AND read it!

No matter what you are doing or selling - be it a product or a service – you want to attract shoppers, clients, existing customers, readers and advocates. Help your customers be better shoppers and they will tell their friends about you, your product or service. Here is a resource for you to help you help your customers:   an infographic from the FTC on being safe when shopping online.

I was reading a white paper from HubSpot this morning on how people are choosing who they do business with, what they are buying and how they choose to spend their money.  The article I was reading discussed one of my favorite topics: push versus pull marketing. Let’s look at a handful of the stats I read about in the first chapter of this white paper:

You already know that the Internet has changed how we find what we want, connect with our friends and seek advice when making a purchase.

• Today more than half of US residents and more than three-quarters of US adults are online.  More and more of those online people are online with their “smart phones”, becoming mobile as well as online via their computers.
• More than one-third of US consumers spend 3+ hours online every day with another third spending more than one hour.
• Nearly half of direct (snail) mail pieces are never opened.
• Marketers (the big guys in particular) are shifting their budgets away from “outbound” to encompass “inbound” marketing utilizing blogs and social media.

As Craig Davis, Chief Creative Officer for the 4th largest advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, said, ”We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

Are you using interruption marketing or being what your perfect client is interested in?

I often wonder how people stay up-to-date on their social media tools.  Several times a month it seems like the Facebook look and feel gets tweaked.  I took a month long class on Facebook  during Q1 2011 and a lot of the information is already out of date.

This month I am taking a class that is easily 40 hours in length, not including my own study time in reviewing what I am learning, on social media tools.  I read at least 10 different newsletters that come to me daily and try to limit my research/learning time to no more than 4 hours daily.  After all, I do have a couple of businesses to manage and a dozen or so authors to return emails to daily.  When I read something new, or listen to a podcast that has something in it I have not heard before, I research it, the person saying it and then figure out how it integrates into my business and my consulting. How can a person who is running a business, writing a book or having a life stay up on all this?

Which tools do you use regularly? Please, share how you manage to stay up-to-date on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other tools by commenting on this post.

This past Wednesday, January 26, 2011, Alex Rice of Facebook, noted in his blog that Facebook has developed an enhanced security feature which is especially desirable for those users who do use public computers or non-secured public Wi-Fi locations to be on Facebook.

Facebook has enabled the “https”, not just for login, but for your entire Facebook experience if you choose that enhancement.  The way you choose that is to go to Account, Account Settings, Account Security.  There you will find an alternative called Secure Browsing (https), Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible.  Just check the box and click the save button.

The “down” side to this feature being enabled is that not all third party applications on Facebook provide for https connections so you may still be at risk  when using those applications.  Also https can slow down the Facebook and any secured applications because encryption takes longer to load a page.  If you do online banking you may have noticed this.  It is important that any time you are doing any activity that involves personal information on the internet, especially if you are doing these things in an unsecured Wi-Fi environment, that you check to be sure you see https:// in your address bar of your browser.  Sometimes it may also appear as highlighted in green, or there is a locked (meaning secure)/unlocked (not secure) icon in the lower right hand corner of your browser window.

Alex also mentions that Facebook is experimenting with a method called Social Authentication to make sure you are who you say you are.  Most sites, including this one, will ask you to enter the letters and numbers in a box (called “Capcha”) before you are allowed to submit, for example, a form to the site.  Facebook is working on testing your knowledge of who your friends are, and other information you have provided to them that only you (and Facebook) should know. How this turns out wil be interesting to watch because someone who decides to “hack” you may be a friend who knows all that information about you already.  This might protect you from someone in another country who does not know you, but it might not protect you from an angry ex-friend.

Since security issues may be one of the top reasons business people are reluctant to start their Social Media Marketing Strategy process,  Facebook has added yet another reason as to why they are the number one social media site today.  If you have questions about Social Media Marketing, strategy, security, Facebook or other social media tools, just call us or email us from our “Contact Us” tab here at expected outcomes and ask your questions.

Do you have an experience(s) you can share about Facebook, or any other social media tool?  Just let us hear about it by commenting below.

2 auto-response tweets email alerts

If there is one thing in today’s world that sends my blood pressure soaring and my irritation level through the roof, it is auto-tweets.  I know it was considered a time-saving, “good” thing to do back a couple of years ago.  Today, when people auto-respond to my “follow”, whether with a “Thank you for following, look forward to reading your tweets” or something way more irritating, “Thanks for the follow. Check my website on how to make a million bucks in the next 5 minutes with my online marketing”, I want to go shout at them.  I certainly consider an immediate “unfollow”, depending on the contents of the auto-response.  If all it is about is how they can sell me something, I “unfollow”.  Sometimes I cut a little slack if it is in an area of interest that I am passionate about – pets, certain causes, business related (just not their business).  But for the most part they clutter up my inbox, my smart phone and generally irritate me.  I can guarantee you I do not read their tweets and I do not retweet them.

How do you feel about auto-responses to your “follow” for someone?  Tell me how you handle this issue?  Do you auto respond?  If so, why?