Desktop and Mobile Applications

• Twhirl – Manage your Twitter account from this desktop application. Simplicity and time saving. Works on both MACs and PCs.
• Twitterrific – The IPhone/Mac application for Twitter.
• TwitterCounter – Check your counts and growth. See how other leaders in your markets fare.
• TwitThis – Bookmark and save your favorite tweets.

Integration and Automation

• Facebook – Adds the Twitter application within your Facebook account and every tweet also gets posted to your Facebook account.

• TweetLater – Pre-schedule tweets, get alerts on your keywords or business name, send welcome messages, easy integration to other social marketing accounts. Can handle multiple Twitter accounts from one login.
• TwitterFeed – One way to integrate your blog posts into tweets.
• TwitPic – Share interesting photos with your followers via this application. Integrate into your social business strategy with engaging captions (tweets) and increase brand awareness.

Finding Your Market

• Search.Twitter – Search for tweets on your topic. This is an amazingly fast and simple way to find your target market, your rabid crowd, the people who need or are searching for what you offer.
• Twellow – Twitter users organized by topic, business, or area of interests.
• Twitterholic – Find the users with the most followers, check how you rank. You might want to think about your strategy here and learn (through other posts and tools reviewed on SocialMarketingStrategy.com) how to get your industry’s top ranked followers to follow you as well.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Share publicly acceptable facts about your business on Twitter – i.e. your business growth, charts, statistics, awards, and other factual data.
6. 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.

I’m sure to take a lot of heat for this post from other marketers, but the fact is, when designing your social markeing strategy, especially if your time is short, you should have representation on at least one social bookmarking site, 3-4 networking sites, a few blogging sites and one mashup. By blogging sites I don’t necessarily mean Wordpress.com, Blogger, or Yahoo 360 (but they’ll do) – by blogging site I mean any Web 2.0 property that allows you to post content and is Web 2.0 compliant by its very nature.

What Is Considered Web 2.0?

May Include: accepting visitor comments, the utilization and organization of content via tagging, a voting feature, RSS integration or creation, email and/or video capabilities, and so on – anything that is interactive for the visitor.

Choosing which ones to engage for marketing purposes first can be a daunting decision, but you are probably already a member of a few for personal interests, so be sure to add your urls and your feeds, as well as using tags within any network you are already using. And, for the sites that facilitate the strategy, employ my transposting technique explained fully in “Why Your Social Marketing Results Suck.”

As an example – using Facebook to capacity. (1) Update your profile to include your url(s) and tag yourself well (they’re called interests in Facebook). (2) Add your RSS feed(s) through any one or more of the applications created for this. By doing so, your entire friend list is notified within hours of posting new content on your blog – this converts to a lot of traffic if you have a large friend list and engaging content. I have very smart people as my Facebook friends, but when I look at their profiles, their website url is blank and they aren’t sharing their content via RSS! Don’t feel bad if you’ve missed this opportunity, just login now and correct it.

Before setting up new accounts or posting content, be sure to read through “What Actions to Take on Web 2.0 Site for Maximum Effectiveness of a Social Marketing Strategy”

Social Networking

1. FaceBook (Apart from the action points in the link above, actively seek out influential others in your niche or target market and add as a friend, then write something interesting on their wall. Their friends will follow – sometimes without any added effort on your part.)

2. Twitter If you’re in multiple markets, set up multiple accounts and watch the Twitter video.

3. StumbleUpon. Don’t spend hours ’stumbling’, just do the basics and stumble interesting, non-competitive sites as well as your own links.

4. Any “networking” site that does well in the search engines for your target market or keywords. How do you find these? Start at Google with your top level keyword and click through some of the top results. You’re sure to find a few that are ranking well and allow networking. (*A top level keyword would be photography or travel vs. wedding shots or European cruise. So you’d search on google for: review travel, share photos, networking photography, etc.)

Blogging Sites

1. Blogger (because google owns it)*.
2. Squidoo, HubPages or WetPaint (or, whichever blog/content site is doing very well in the search results for your market.)
3. WordPress.com (not a self-hosted WordPress blog, but one hosted by WordPress itself.)*

*You add your own site’s RSS feed on Wordpress (through widgets) and on Blogger (through applications) for regularly updated content that links back to your website.

Social Bookmark

Honestly, any of the big ones will do. Propeller can be fantastic, but Del.icio.us and Reddit are long time favorites for a reason! FeedAgg is hot right now (March 2009).

MashUp

1. FriendFeed – As with Twitter, if you’re in multiple markets set up one FriendFeed account for each. If you’re a busy marketer with many websites, group them together into 2-3 main accounts or you’ll go crazy trying to manage them all. Read all the posts here on FriendFeed.

]]> http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/social-sites-you-must-be-on/feed/ 0 http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/friendfeed-account/ http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/friendfeed-account/#comments Sat, 28 Feb 2009 05:31:54 +0000 Laura Childs http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/?p=346 To sign up for FriendFeed, go to: www.FriendFeed.com and “Click Create an Account”.

You’ll see this page:

The first screen you'll see when you setup your FriendFeed account.

Fill in the Email address and Name boxes.

Next, choose a nickname. This could be your name or some other handle you use elsewhere. If you’re using FriendFeed to brand your name, then use your real name.

The line on the right will indicate whether or not the nickname is already chosen. You’ll then choose your personal password. Then click on Create my account.

You’ll next come to a page that looks like this:

Here you can choose to aggregate your Facebook friends with one easy step. This causes FriendFeed to “mesh” your Facebook friends into FriendFeed so you have a seamless compilation.

You can also quickly import your entire current email list from any of the popular email clients like Gmail, AOL, etc. I don’t do this. Probably because I get bombarded with these kinds of requests on a regular basis and it’s inconvenient.

You don’t have to do this part right now, so just skip it – you can add this in later. Skip this step to go to the next page.

This is a list of Popular FriendFeeders that you may choose to add to your FriendFeed.

It’s great exposure if you can become one of the people popular enough to be featured on this page. Notice good old Ed Dale smack dab in the middle?

You'll notice some big name marketers are already present on FriendFeed.com

Subscribe to your favorites.

Here again, unless you see someone you know you want to subscribe to, just hit
Next: See your FriendFeed! >>

That’s it! No profiles to fill out and blanks to fill with your personal information just to get an account.

You’re probably wondering, “Why Not?”

Well, remember that FriendFeed is taking in your feeds from your other social sites where you’re already established with a profile. FriendFeed simply brings all those feeds into one “clearinghouse” of blurbs and microblogs so friends, family, co-workers, customers, team members and – you name it – can read your feeds.

Part 2: Adding Your Social Feeds and Blogs to FriendFeed

I’ll take you through how to add your own feeds to fill out your public FriendFeed – the part that others will want to subscribe to.

To add a social network feed, on your Home page, find this button:

Add Your Feeds to FriendFeed.

When you click on it, you get this:

The screen you'll see when you add your feeds to FriendFeed.com

These are not all the services listed. If you don’t see some of your services, click on “See all 59…” (or whatever number is currently there) “…services.”

Now, you see some of my services listed on the right. Right now I have my three blogs, my Facebook account, YouTube, and Twitter. But let’s pretend I didn’t have Twitter on there yet.

I want to add my Twitter feed, so I click the Twitter icon and get:

Use this box to add Twitter to FriendFeed..

You just need to type in your Twitter user name – LauraChilds – in my case and hit “Import Twitter”. Super simple. Now you see Twitter listed in my feeds list.

Now go ahead and do that with all of your feeds.

If you have a WordPress blog for instance, you can add your blog’s RSS feed to your FriendFeed account through the RSS module.

Click the orange RSS Blog button and you get this:

Here again, it’s as simple as entering your blog’s URL and then clicking Import Blog. Your blog is now instantly added to your own FriendFeed account and all of the world can find your public media all in one easy to find place.

Now that you have your account set up and you’re starting to add some of your own feeds and favorites to your account, I’ll leave you for a day and return later with some advanced social marketing tips for FriendFeed.com!

]]> http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/friendfeed-account/feed/ 0 http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/paid-advertising-on-facebook-tip/ http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/paid-advertising-on-facebook-tip/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:44:11 +0000 Laura Childs http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/?p=306 You’ll want to visit the Facebook tutorial and ebook page – behind membership on SocialMarketingStrategy.com – as well if you’re interested in Facebook advertising, but here’s a quick tip to whet your whistle in the meantime…

Another way to monetize your Facebook profile by including laser targeted adverts for whatever you want on your Profile page.

A leading online advertising company has recently launched a service where you can add targeted advertising into approximately 100 different applications within Facebook.

The Facebook advertising module is here, (opens in a new window).

The idea is that a click on the advert will take your viewer directly to a page on your own site, or on another site of your choosing. Remember again not to be too obvious with any kind of promotional materials on Facebook.

Once on the Facebook campaign page, choose the application you want to use to advertise within and then follow the instructions. You’ll create your AdBrite campaign, pay for it, and then get the code so that you can add the application that you chose to your profile, with the ad embedded within it.

The ads are going to be charged on what is known as a ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC) basis. That is, every time that someone clicks on your ad, you are going to pay for it. Therefore, if your ad is written poorly or inaccurately, you may end up spending all of your advertising budget drawing clicks from folks who never had any real intention of considering your offer anyway.

]]> http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/paid-advertising-on-facebook-tip/feed/ 0 http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/membership/ http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/membership/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2008 03:45:21 +0000 Laura Childs http://www.socialmarketingstrategy.com/?p=75

ATTENTION: Login or out using the controls in the sidebar (at top of right hand column of every post on this site). If you aren’t currently a member, you can register here.

Social Marketing Strategy is a website that provides beginner and beginner-plus information, content and training on social marketing for free, but charges a small fee for intermediate and advanced training.

You have either landed on this page because you are interesting in purchasing a membership or because you were trying to view videos, pdfs, or strategies that require membership status to access.

Membership to the entire website, unlocking all videos, training documentation, strategy related posts and step by step instructions are available for a one-time fee of $27 and includes:

• 12-20 (and potentially more) videos on specific social networks and bookmarking websites. These walk-through videos are full of tips, strategies, and are actual screencasts of the website. The primary purpose of each video is to give you a quick overview, discuss how to market or solicit on the site as well as use the website to drive traffic to your own domain or offer.
• My advanced notes and strategies within membership-only posts on this blog. Look I just got tired of it…5 years of sharing my secrets on three other blogs, strategies and shortcuts that others happily profited from without any attribution, and in some cases not even a link back to my site. I’m still happy to share my ideas and post notes about what’s working now in social marketing, but I’m not about to give it all away free anymore. Besides, I don’t think anyone who is serious about their online business, or needs to market their website and make more sales will feel the sting of investing $17 for a lifetime membership to SocialMarketingStrategy.com
• My strategy and training pdfs. Currently I am including only one (my latest) ebook on social marketing. Entitled “Why Your Social Marketing Sucks and What You Can Do About It Today” originally sold for $47 but is listed on a few of my other websites for $37. Not only will you get the videos (above), plus my advanced strategy posts (coming over the next few weeks, but you will receive the ebook at a savings of $10. This offer is only available at www.SocialMarketingStrategy.com

Finally, I have to be blatantly honest with you here. I’ve not written some massive sales letter to get you drooling and I can’t promise that this website will be my top priority at this time. The videos will be added over the next few months, the commentary and strategies after that, but the pdf (which will provide a huge wake up call to many) will be available immediately.

I have reasons for not giving top priority to the project, and they’re honest ones. If you don’t like them, I completely understand and won’t feel bad that you learn the beginner material and just move on…really.

1. Last year our house burned down. We’re rebuilding. This is time consuming stuff and one of my top priorities.
2. I have just been commissioned to write a hard cover book in my industry. It has a deadline, therefore it is another of my top priorities.
3. I have a teenage daughter. If you’re a parent I don’t need to say another thing, now do I? I also homeschool my girl.
4. I am working on my own websites, my own marketing, in my own niches. People often ask me why I don’t just pay someone else to do the work. Its because I love this work and performing it keeps me on top of what is happening in online marketing at all times.
5. I volunteer at the local high school. Yes, it is true. My own daughter is home schooled, but every Wednesday we are in the school cooking meals for the other teenagers as an act of community.
6. I am now also involved in the redevelopment and awareness of my local town. Not sure why, it just sparked an interest…

So where does this project, this SocialMarketingStrategy.com project, fit on my list of priorities?

Somewhere just above or below item 4, dependant on the day.

To sum up, if you can spare $17 to save yourself hours of work time, cut through the confusion, and start getting more use out of your social marketing, the PayPal button is below (will be by March 01, 2009). After payment and membership has been processed, you will immediately access the training pdf(s), the videos and the posts. You will also be informed by email everytime a new post (Web 2.0 site and matching strategy) or video is added. As a lifetime member you will always have immediate access.

Thank you for your time reading this. I completely understand how valuable every moment of every day is, and appreciate your attention.

To your success!

Laura Childs
SocialMarketingStrategy.com