The world of Digg can be harsh to business owners and marketers just wanting to share their content or news with the world at large. What most fail to understand is that even though everyone knows about Digg, Digg is a world of it’s own. A world where not everyone, nor every story is appreciated. In fact Digg may not suit your business model or your marketing strategy, so I’ve put together a list of insights and tips on using Digg to help you decide – before you waste your time there.
- Spend some time exploring the Digg site before committing to a user account. Be sure you understand how Digg works.
- Pay attention to user comments, and be prepared to respond as well as become an active part of the conversation.
- Get a feel for how and why certain stories become popular. This will give you a better understanding of Digg, and also give you insight into how to make your stories and postings more popular.
- Once you sign up for an account, plan to participate daily. A sometimes-on, sometimes-off attitude will make you appear uncommitted to fellow Diggers.
- Try to accumulate as many friends as you can. Much like Twitter, you want as large of a network as possible. This way, you affect more people with your message and gain more feedback into what the Digg world wants.
- Start a buddy list. This list is designed to give you a one on one ability within Digg. It allows IM use, but try to not use this feature too much or you’ll turn people off. Read more…
Site Specific Training business, digg.com, rss, social network, website traffic
A few of my favorite Twitter applications – when you’ve employed social marketing for your business – are listed below with a brief introduction. Not all applications will be of value to all businesses or strategies so don’t feel that you need to use, employ, install, or integrate each one. Knowing some of the capabilities of these applications might spark a new marketing idea in the future, so save this page to your favorites. Read more…
Site Specific Training applications, business, social marketing, twitter.com
If you’re using Twitter for business outreach and promotion, consider the top X Twitter tips for business when setting up your profile and designing your social marketing.
- Add your Twitter profile to your business cards, your website, and in email signatures. In face to face and casual meetings and introductions, when exchanging contact information don’t stop at phone numbers and emails, ask for Twitter profile names and share yours.
- Tweet from conferences and trade shows to update your customers and peers on what you’re seeing and doing. This shows them that you’re being proactive and it’s a lot of fun as well. You can tell them some funny things you might be seeing at the trade show,
or maybe inform them of an interesting vendor you’ve hooked up with. By sharing your experiences as you go along, you’re garnering more interest in what is happening with your business.
- Choose your networking buddies carefully. You don’t have to simply befriend every person you can that requests you or vice versa on Twitter. Network instead with noteworthy business associates, competitors, and peers. Look for fellow executives or business owners who work within your market. Then, follow their progress, look for advice, and of course, offer some of your own. By befriending people who are in the same line of work as you, you’ll get an insider’s look at how their successes compare to yours.
- If your company is large or your employees diverse, allow a few employees to Tweet on company time about company business. This way customers get to know others in the business and it adds depth and diversity for the business, and gives clients and prospects a cast of characters to follow instead of a faceless, nameless company.
- Share publicly acceptable facts about your business on Twitter – i.e. your business growth, charts, statistics, awards, and other factual data.
- Stay on top of what other people are tweeting about your company. If you find tweets about you, join the conversation. Thank them for compliments, or attempt to make good if they have a legitimate complaint. Remember that you’re never 100% safe from someone who might try to talk negatively about you, your website, or anything else on Twitter. Be sure to use this to your advantage in a diplomatic way. Set up an account at Tweet Later to be notified by email whenever anyone tweets on your topic, business name, or keyword.
Advanced business, network, social marketing, twitter.com
There are a lot of ways to use or customize Twitter that the average user doesn’t even know exists. This quick article is for business owners who don’t have time to discover all the techniques and social marketing strategies possible with Twitter but are fully aware that they ‘need’ to start using it. These are all are easy to implement without getting lost in a sea of geek terms and instructions.
The tips below are for automating your tweets so you don’t have to be a slave to the machine, whether you’re tweeting from a browser or your mobile phone. You’ll find more fast tips for Twitter in other posts – what to Tweet about, tones of your Tweets, special business promotions, and advanced Twitter features are all to follow.
For complete Newbies to Twitter I’d suggest reading all the tips in this series until you land on one that is relevant to your target market and then put it into practice. Once you’re comfortable with the Twitter interface and application, move onto a new tip to integrate into your business marketing.
To get right to my top tool for Twitter automation (there are others and other methods, but that one is my favorite. Below are ways to put the tool to best use and the reasons why.
- Once you’re tweeting and have followers, do not stop abruptly or you’ll lose your market share and the attention of your peers, your customers and network. Remember that a vital facet of marketing – online or off – is getting yourself in the way of the customer once they’re ready to commit. If you aren’t already a household name or on the tip of everyone’s tongue, you’d better keep tweeting on a regular basis. If your lifestyle is changing and you can’t tweet three times a day anymore, wean your contacts over two weeks to only hearing from you once every few days. If regular tweets are too much to manage right now, sign up for an automation service and load up your tweet sequence to manage your marketing until you can get back to a regularly scheduled program.
- Automated Tweet services help you prioritize your own marketing tasks as well as keep up to date on messages from your competitors. You can sign up for alerts on topics, search terms, or keywords for notification, so that the topics important to you will be delivered daily.
- Automating your Twitter posts is not evil and it reaps sweet benefits. These tools are no different than a marketing auto-responder that allow you to type tweets in advance. Plan ahead, select the dates and times, and they will post to your account on schedule. A fantastic time saver!
- Use automated tweets to supplement your own hands-on messages. Fill up your future tweets with a different message each day that filters user traffic to existing articles on your website, incredible free offers, or anything else you find appropriate to promote. Automation is a great way to increase awareness of your brand, your beliefs, your knowledge and offerings – that they might not know about previously.
- If they weren’t interested in what you had to say, they wouldn’t have added you, so don’t be shy. You should be updating your followers on a regular basis – be a good leader, but don’t posture or flaunt. This is all about the ‘connection’ between you and your target market.
- Help people stay updated through a Twitter ‘feed’ that runs on your website or WordPress blog via a widget. This style of automation is ‘hands off’, a set it and forget it, allowing new Twitter posts each time you publish an article and/or your Twitter posts to show up in your blog’s sidebar.
Intermediate, Site Specific Training automation, business, twitter.com, wordpress
