Social Media Advisors

Goo.gl Changes Link Shortening

SEO, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

Today I took some time to play with a new favorite of mine Goo.gl. This is a great product that the search engine giant created that simply rocks. What Goo.gl does is allows you to shorten links quickly and easily.This feature alone is nice, but it isn’t the reasons that fell in love with this new product. There are three major pieces that I simply love with Goo.gl. Here’s a short synopsis of it.

QR Codes

QR Codes are the newest & latest craze that is sweeping the digital community. Many think it is a way to make paper marketing once again effective. Personally, I don’t think things are quite there yet. I understand the concepts of QR codes and think they are cool, but unless consumers have a smart phone they cannot use QR code. I have seen many people starting to remove all their contact information and placing just a QR code there for people to scan. I am all for cutting edge technology but, I think that is a little more on the bleeding edge. Nevertheless, you can create them very quickly and easily by using Goo.gl. All you need to do is add .qr to the link. I simply copied the image and then linked to it and the QR code to the right was made. In the future as QR codes continue to grow in popularity, I see Goo.gl becoming a very important tool used to creating them.

Goo.gl Allows Easy Link Tracking

Wonder how many people are really clicking on the links you share on Facebook, Twitter, and more? If you shorten the links with Goo.gl, you can then track instantly how many times your links are clicked upon and also where your efforts are paying off. I ran a test earlier today with one of Jason Crouch’s posts on Using Social Media to increase Face to Face Meetings. I then shared the shortened link on Facebook and also on Twitter. You can see the results below. It shows you how many clicks, where they clicked in and also you can see the time where I posted it as well as when Jason did. At both times there was a quick spike in traffic.

The other things I enjoy is that Goo.gl shows me what browswers, what country and also what platforms the person was using when they clicked the link. I know, you may be thinking who cares about how many times something gets clicked and where they click from, but three situations where you may care.

1. Clients want to know what your online marketing efforts are doing for them. Ever have a client that wants to just see the numbers? This happens so many times when things may not be going perfect. You are doing your job, it is just taking a little more time to bring the results they expect. The next time you have someone ask you well what is going on with (insert so many things here) that you could respond with, let me see what type of clicks we are getting.

When the client sees that you have generated 28,000 clicks, they will be able to see that you are doing a good job and hopefully reduce the heat.

2. What network is my sweet spot? I share things on Facebook all the time but don’t really see a ton of interactions on my Facebook profile or our company Facebook Page in comments/likes. But when I started doing the test, I noticed quickly that on my first test link that Facebook connections clicked on the link a lot more than those on Twitter. While Google Analytics gives me some of this info, I am not crazy about the fact that it takes time for the analytics to update. With Goo.gl it updates instantly. I am a big fan of instant results. (not a Google Instant pun)

3. Effective Time Management. Ever wonder what time of day is best for you to be tweeting and sharing info? Well, with Goo.gl you can quickly and easily view when your links are getting more clicks and adjust your strategies accordingly. Test it out over few different days and times and you will learn quickly.

Collaborative Link Tracking

If you are like me, you work on projects from time to time with teams. Or maybe even with just your clients. One of the coolest features that Goo.gl does is allow you to create a shortened link, give to a group to share and then also let the entire group track the Results. In the first comment below you will see a link to track the clicks on this post. So if you want to share the Goo.gl shortened link for this post and see what type of traffic you generate you can. Anyone and everyone that you want to share the data with can by simply visiting a URL.

No longer will clients be contacting you wanting updates on numbers. They can simply follow along with you as you share with your online friends about their product or service.

Go give Goo.gl a try now! By the way, all the links in this post have been shortened, so when you click around, I am gonna know! 🙂

Using Social Media to Enhance Face-to-Face Meetings

How to Use Twitter, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

For the past couple of years, I’ve been helping others to market effectively online, having done this for my own businesses since 1996. One of the interesting trends I’ve noted is the fact that some people (and companies) spend a lot of time and effort working on their online presence, at the expense of “real world” interaction.

Social media (or “new media”, if you prefer) tools and platforms aren’t intended to supplant face-to-face interaction and networking, but to ENHANCE them.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Perhaps you really don’t want to meet and engage in a personal manner. The only valid example I can think of is if you are a full-time eBay seller and you never meet customers or you happen to provide a product that doesn’t require much trust or a relationship to sell (not sure what that might be – perhaps paper clips or straws?).

However, for the rest of us, those of us who want to make an impact, or to have a wide network of friends and resources, you need to get out and press the flesh when you can. Sorry – I guess “press the flesh” sounds a little vulgar or old-fashioned these days. It’s best to make an effort to meet and speak with real, live people. Better?

I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past, especially since we have a large family and it’s not always easy to make time for travel and/or events. That being said, I thrive on working a crowd at an event, especially when I know a good number of people already. It energizes me.

My son thinks I’m already pretty famous. Of course, I don’t want to dispel this notion too much, but I am clearly not Ashton Kutcher or even Clint Howard (Google that one if you like). I once saw Chris Brogan speak to a crowd of about 300 people, and it put things in perspective for me when he asked, “How many people here know me personally?” There were a few hands that went up. Then he asked, “How many people here FEEL like you know me?” Almost every hand in the room went up. To me, this is a good way to gauge if you’re doing things right with your online efforts. It’s one thing to build a tremendous number of followers, but it’s quite another for them to actually care about you as a human being or about your company.

I joked a few days ago on Twitter that I think there should be an award given for “Most Followers with the Least Engaged Audience”. There are many hundreds of accounts vying for this title. I like to equate this type of “blind broadcast” to having the chance to speak at halftime during the Super Bowl while the entire audience puts on blindfolds and those fancy noise-cancellation headphones. What a waste! If you want to actually grow a business, or make valuable connections, or basically build any real influence at all, face-to-face goes a long way, especially when combined with an engaging online presence.

Can you build a solid audience without meeting everyone in person? Of course you can, but it will grow faster and bond more quickly when you’re out and about, shaking real hands and giving real hugs. Even politicians do that. You want to be more trusted than a politician, right?

Just some food for thought…

Image credit: Jerry (found on Flickr.com)

7 Ways to Be Hated on Twitter

Social Media Advisors

Today I am sharing part 2 of my series on Social Media Engagement vs. Sales. Last week I shared Six Steps to Converting Guests to Fans of Your Facebook Page. It covered several different issues that I have seen on various Facebook Pages over the past few months.

This post is today is going to venture into the world of Twitter. Twitter is another great resource for growing your business online. Nowhere else on the web can you engage people and have so many conversations at once. But what I have found is that many have turned Twitter into their spam grounds. They set up accounts and try to garner as many followers as they can in the quickest means possible. The concept is that if they get thousands of followers they will have a giant net to share their products to and will in essence sell more things. But what I have found is that this is not the case.

When you build a twitter profile where there is no engagement, it results in a very low return on your investment. I am somewhat an open networker. I will accept anyone as a friend and give them a chance to show me they don’t belong connected to me anymore. Yesterday I received an auto from a new follower from which I have been able to find 7 things that everyone should NOT do with their twitter account. The following points all came from one single account.

7 Ways to be Hated on Twitter.

1- The auto DM. When I first started on Twitter, I thought it was a good idea to send an Auto message to every new follower with information about me and a link to my site. In the beginning it was actually an effective tool to me as the first followers to my account were friends that I knew. But I learned quickly that spammers and others began to abuse this feature.

I quickly disabled it and have since really started to notice the annoyance of users that use those type of services. Over to the right you can see an automated message from the account I recently followed. Their message sent said: “Thanks for following! I HATE SPAM! You won’t get that from me. Maybe check out my blog of Twitter tips/tactics for marketers/networkers.” My next action was to unfollow and block their account.

2. Creating Good First Impressions- If your first impression is trying to convince me you hate spam and don’t do that through a spammed message, you have already lost me. A much more effective way to meet someone on Twitter is to listen to what they are saying and engage with them. Joining into a conversation is really easy to do on Twitter as people are constantly posting things wanting you to interact with them. When you see someone post something that you either have an interest in or a way of adding to the conversation, simply do that.

3. Stop Talking To Yourself! I try to spend more time listening & interacting with others on twitter than I do talking about myself or my business. I don’t use a specific formula for this, I just try to keep the conversations more about others instead of me. When everything is all about you and nothing about your friends/followers, they will listen and follow along for a short while, but after a few days of all you and nothing about them they will move on and ignore you.

4. Mentioning Others Make You Human- When I look at your Twitter stream do I see you interacting & talking to others? Or is it littered with you spewing junk all over the place? If all I see is you spitting info without any interaction, it is a pretty quick indicator to me that you are someone that will be spamming my stream and also add zero value to me. Remember, you are coming into my stream of Twitter, it needs to be beneficial to me not you. When your stream shows that you will connect with me and do something valuable to me, I will want to pay attention to you.

5. Share Your Website- This one blew my mind yesterday in the spammers DM to me. He mentions that I should visit his blog for tips to help. But when I visited his profile, there was no link to a site. If you want to be helpful and give me advice, then you need to give me an avenue to travel to it. Just saying visit my blog or website won’t cut it if there is no link to it. Your profile on Twitter is a powerful part of your Twitter Account. Adding that link takes only five seconds and helps you to look like less of a spammer.

6. What’s Your Ratio? When I look at your profile, do I see you following thousands of people with a lot less following you back? When I see a profile like this, it screams that this is someone just trying to get more followers and isn’t very interesting. If you share things that are relevant & engaging, people will want to follow you and you will have many more following you than who you are following. Because of spammers trying to capitalize on this by following more and more people, Twitter installed some guidelines. You can follow up to 2,000 people initially. Then you are only allowed to follow 10% more than those who are following you. So if you have 10,000 followers, you can only follow 11,000 at any time. As your number of followers grow, you can also follow more again.

7. Skip the Selling & Gimmicks- You have minimal characters on your profile to share what it is about. If you are taking that premium ad space to try and promote a gimmick or something you are selling, you will be turning people off. The profile yesterday started out fine by saying that they provide Twitter tips/tactics and Social Media marketing which can be helpful. But after that, they added a gimmick to try and get more exposure and followers by saying “I promote people w/10k+, RT for an add to daily RT list. I follow back!” When I saw this sentence I knew instantly that this person was someone I did not want to interact with anymore. Then, I visited their profile on Twitter.com to see what other junk I may find.

In their background image, they had added the following text:

The timeline and the blog linked above my bio have lots of information about how to turbo-charge Twitter and make money online through Twitter and social media in general. If you retweet my posts about my blog, I’ll follow you, add you to my RT list, and give you a solo shoutout with lots of hashtags in it. I also add any users with 10,000+ followers that RT me to my RT list.

These type of gimmicks do nothing but remind me of MLM schemes of days before. Also, I don’t believe there is any value that a spammer can add to me by spamming a tweet with my username and “lots of hashtags in it.” Engagement is what makes Twitter and other social media platforms successful for your business. A great quote from John Maxwell comes to mind: If you are leading, but nobody is following, then you are just out taking a walk.

So, to keep yourself from becoming a disliked person on Twitter, please ignore the 7 practices listed above. Instead follow the habits of successful people on twitter like @lizstrauss and @chrisbrogan and you will see rewards come your way. I promise!

photo credit

Social Media Winner of the Week! New Regular Feature at 210 Consulting

Social Media Advisors, Social Media Winner

Not too long ago, during an episode of our weekly radio program, “Social Media Edge“, I came up with an idea that I thought had merit and have since implemented. Each week, we name a Social Media Winner and Loser of the Week. Some weeks, I have trouble coming up with one or the other, but it’s a fun segment. Jeremy thought it would be a great idea to have the same thing here on our company blog, and this is the first installment. So, without further ado….

Our Social Media Winner of the Week is Shareaholic, which is responsible for the WordPress plugin known as SexyBookmarks. It’s the thing that looks like this at the bottom of each of our posts and enables our readers to spread our content to their networks:

You’ve probably seen examples of this on blogs across the internet at this point. According to their site, they have nearly 500,000 downloads so far!

So, how did they manage to win this (rather prestigious) new award?

1. They listened.

2. After listening, they acted.

Here’s the scoop:

Jeremy reviewed SexyBookmarks in this post recently. He mentioned how much we both like the plugin, but he also suggested an improvement:

SexyBookmarks needs to fix:

The one thing that really annoys me when I am setting up this plugin for a client is that the most popular list is really not the most popular sites for here in the USA. The one that really blows my mind is that Facebook, the social media 800 LB gorilla is not chosen when you click most popular. I wish that they could at least add Facebook and a few others onto that list.

He quickly received this comment from Jay at Shareaholic:

But that’s not all!

Shareaholic also saw Jeremy’s tweet to someone wherein he said that we install SexyBookmarks on every site we build for our clients here at 210 Consulting. They noticed, and they retweeted this. Kudos to them for paying attention, unlike SO MANY companies out there.

Big congratulations to Shareaholic for being on top of your game and for winning our inaugural prize.

Keep an eye out here on our blog for future installments. We’re also not afraid to post the “Losers of the Week” (or month, or year), so that should make for some interesting future reading.

Thanks for stopping by!

Social Media Engagement vs Sales

Facebook, Facebook For Business, Social Media Advisors

Today I decided to start another mini series here on the 210 blog. It was birthed out of cleaning out my Page Suggestions box on my Facebook Profile. You know what I mean, all those wonderful requests you get to join pages like “My Dog is Cuter than Yours” & “Save the endangered Grass.” In addition to the silly requests, you also get invited daily to join pages of your friends & connections on Facebook. This post talks about ways to get more people converted to liking your page & participating on it.

Before I share what can help increase the number of people joining your Facebook Page, let me first share my requirements to click like and join your page. If your page can accomplish any one of the following things, it stands a good chance I will like it. It has to do one of these:

Engage me on a topic I am interested in.
Give some sort of information that can be helpful to me.
Be involved with a charity/cause topic that interests me.
Be different & unique with what they offer that captures my attention.
Be the page of a good friend who I enjoy helping and am interested in what they might say..

So as I was clearing out the 428 invitations to join pages, I decided it was time to turn it into a blog post as I found several pages (about 419) that didn’t follow any of these rules. Here are 6 ways to convert guests to fans of your Facebook Page.

Engage Me at the Title

The first thing that makes me not want to join a page is the title. If you want to attract more people to your page and get them interested in what is happening there, you need to have a great title. You need to pick this wisely in the beginning because once you set the page title, you can never change it.

We work with a lot of clients in the real estate industry and when they go to set up pages, they normally set the title to something like the one to the right. I hid all this person’s incriminating info to protect their identity. Trust me when I say they are not alone with creating a page title that is simply, their name, Realtor. In this case, they didn’t even use REALTOR® properly. But that is a whole other conversation. When you are trying to get your friends on Facebook and all of their friends to join your Facebook Page, you need to start with an interesting title. The only people that will be joining this page are those that are friends of this agent. As you can see, so far the page only has 1 fan. If you make the page more about an area of interest, a specific topic or idea, people will be more willing to join. When the title sounds like a sales pitch, or business card, people are not as quick to join and participate.

Ask ME Questions

One of the best ways to get interaction & people talking about your Facebook page is to ask questions that people can’t resist answering. For example, one of the pages I created has over 90% of the posts I place just being questions. The interaction level on this page is really good and people love to find out more information not just from me. I can go to this page once every 3-4 days and ask a simple question and the fans of the page give enough answers helping the group find new & interesting things without me having to do all the leg work. This page has grown on it’s own to over 650 fans and I have done hardly anything to accomplish this. I might spend a total of 10 minutes per week on the page.

Too many times do I see Pages turned into just another aspect of broadcasting all the info you have on your website which can be helpful, but nobody wants to just read all about you unless you are an internationally known brand or celebrity.

Include Posts by Others In Your Feed

One of the simplest things you can do on your Facebook Page is change the settings as to what shows up in your feed. The default is always set to just the things said by the page. In a matter of seconds you can change that to show what the page & the fans of it are saying on it. I think this is a major component to whether people feel important on the page. Think about this a moment: What is the best type of advertising for a business? Word of mouth from happy clients! If you hide the fans that are saying great things about your business, you are overlooking a very powerful source of marketing. Change the settings to show both, and then monitor what is said. I will give you a fair warning that you may get spammed by this, which seems to be taking place more often lately.

The one comment I get when I mention changing to this option with a client is “what if someone posts something negative about us?” You do run the risk of something like this happening whether it is true or not. But, this is also a great way to grow your business by how you handle these types of situations. I have seen way too many companies handle it incorrectly, but if you can address the complaints timely and properly, it shows that your business is paying attention & cares what your clients think. Doing this type of customer service can take a business from good to excellent over night.

Respond! Respond!

Replying to what people say on your Facebook page is HUGE. Every time a fan writes something on your wall, you get free advertising as it shows up on their wall activity. So, if that person leaves 5 comments, there are 5 links back to your page promoting it to their friends. When the friends see that, they become curious and will come visit the page too. You also make the fans of the page feel important when they are receiving direct contact from you.

A good friend of mine, Mike Mueller calls this comment tennis. Whenever someone comments on his page, he makes sure to always go back and be the last commenter on anything. This can become a little time consuming if your page starts to take off, but the rewards from doing so can be great. If your page grows so large that you feel you are spending too much time doing this, then add an additional admin to the page to help you monitor/respond to everyone.

Be More Vain

Facebook introduced the use of vanity URL’s several months back and so many still are unaware of them. What’s a vanity URL? Well, it a simpler way to tell people to get to your new page. Instead of trying to tell someone to visit our Facebook Page by visiting: http://www.facebook.com/210consulting?v=app_4949752878&ref=ts I can simply say, go to http://facebook.com/210consulting. Not only does it look nicer on a business card and email signature, but it is also easier to remember. To set up a vanity URL for your page, you need to have at least 25 people who like your page. Once you reach this number you can then visit http://facebook.com/username and claim your URL.

Make sure you spell your new vanity URL properly and that you are NOT violating any trademark laws! You remember what happened to this rather large group of 47,000 fans. Facebook will not change the links once you select them, so take some time to think this through before claiming yours.

Get Custom Landing Pages

What a better way to engage your new fans than with a custom landing tab on your Facebook Business page. The possibilities on these tabs are virtually endless. I’ve seen everything from the implementation of welcome videos to mini versions of a full website built inside a tab. In fact, with the write person creating your tab, you could even do e-commerce right inside your Facebook page. These tabs can be branded to match your site and build your branding inside Facebook. These aren’t always the simplest things to build, the take a pretty good knowledge of HTML & FBML to create. My suggestion is to hire a professional to build one for you. For a few hundred bucks you can have something great built that can pay off for itself in no time if it increases your business. If you need help setting a custom landing tab, contact us, we know the best in the biz at making these.

If you implement these 6 simple steps into your Facebook Page strategies you will begin to see the conversion of people to your page increase greatly. If you have any questions, or need any more assistance with a Facebook Page, feel free to ask us. We would love to assist!