Social Media Advisors – Page 52 – We are Social Media Advisors, a Social Media Speaker, & Custom WordPress Site design.

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!

Scheduling Your Blog Week in Only a Few Hours

How To Blog, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We do a lot of coaching with clients on how to start a blog and writing effective blog posts for SEO. Whenever I start the process of teaching the client how to do so, usually am met by the comment “I don’t have time” excuse, that I have to tackle instantly. Don’t get me wrong, I know writing blog posts can be time consuming, especially in the beginning when you are just starting. However, I always share that if you can set aside only 2-3 hours on a weekend while watching football, you can have a productive blog. Here’s how:

Before venturing into the world of WordPress, I used to share with clients to just place the posts into draft mode and then on Monday, Wednesday, & Friday Morning to just take a post and send it live. Then spend the rest of the day and a half just responding to the comments. For someone who is new to blogging, this is a good strategy because you are getting new content released every other day and starting to get you a build up of content which helps immensely with SEO.

Then I moved to the world of WordPress which helps make this strategy even easier. When you write inside WordPress, they have a scheduling function built inside the program. That means I can write this post on Saturday afternoon and schedule it to release on Monday Morning at 10:32 AM. By doing so, this means my post will now go live at that time and I don’t have to even be near my computer. In fact, I am nowhere around when this post went live in all actuality. I am out right now on a golf course doing my best impression of “lefty” Phil Mickelson. This is just one of many reasons why WordPress Rocks!

So give the scheduling function of WordPress a try if you never have before. It is a wonderful feature especially if you are on vacation, on the golf course, or tied up with clients. To your readers, they will never know the difference! 🙂

Google Instant and How It Will Change Your Keywords

Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors

Google Instant released today which I believe will be making some major changes in the way consumers search online. What this allows is for people using the search engine giant to begin the search process while you type in the term you are searching for. No longer to you have to type in the entire phrase and then wait for it to bring you back results. Because of this, I think there will be some major changes coming in the way keywords are determined for your website.

First, the Longtail Shift

Longtail Keywords have been a major player in the success of so many websites over the past few years. People have been able to generate large sums of business by skipping the major terms and focusing on all the other things applicable to their business. By doing this, you were able to rank well on specific keywords and get those people first and foremost. The quality of these leads are great and more likely to turn into a transaction. But, with the implementation of Google Instant, I think this will begin to shift. People will no longer take the time to type in longer terms like before. From playing with Google Instant most of the morning I found that after the first 3-4 words of a search term I was normally able to find something that fit what I was looking for. So the number of people doing 6-10 word searches will begin to drop dramatically. This means 2 things:

1. We will need to start learning more condensed keywords to do instead. So if my keyword before was “how to tie a full windsor knot video,” I need to now focus on the term “How to Tie a.” because when you type those first four words, Google has already displayed multiple videos that will show you exactly what you wanted to learn.

2. The quality of those still doing the extra long search will be even stronger.

Bye Bye Plural Words

One of the terms that our business has been able to always rank well because of it being part of the name of our company is Social Media Advisors. We’ve dominated page one of the search engines since almost the inception of our website. But, now when someone goes to Google and starts to type that term, they will get all the results they would want by simply typing “social media advisor” and will get all the results they need. They don’t need to add the plural S anymore to find what they want. In fact, you could simply type social media advis and find the same results. For our company, we will now need to change some of our keywords to rank on better terms.

This means for sites, your keywords will need to be updated. If you are in the real estate industry for example, you no longer need to fight to rank on terms like Myrtle Beach Homes, or Myrtle Beach Houses you can now focus on just Myrtle Beach Home and other singular terms. If you are some of the early adopters to these new sets of keywords you will be able to get established on the singular terms before others realize the change.

The Art of Typos

This SEO tip has been around for a while, but with the implementation of Google Instant, it becomes even more important. How many times have you made a typo when entering a search term in Google? If you are anything like me, it happens probably multiple times each day. Since the new search engine will auto-fill results without needing to correct the typos. So, while it may seem a little crazy to do, but focusing once in a while on typo keywords could bring you massive amounts of traffic with Google Instant.

Your competitors won’t be able to understand how your business is doing so well while they are struggling. All because you did a few simple typo error terms that are showing up ahead of them in the search engines. It’s a great source of traffic and can be an even great source of revenue!

So now that Google Instant has been released, it is time to revisit your keyword research for your site’s search engine optimization and figure out what the newest things we should focus on. As always, if you need our services to assist you with the search engine optimization of your site, you can contact us if you need help with your social media needs.

Photo Credit: Change Coming