Tag Archives: Twitter

Facebook: What, Why, Who, How?

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I’ve noticed more and more Facebook Fan Pages popping up and it’s great.  Fan Pages are a great way to connect with people, build your credibility and ultimately generate leads and grow your business. The problem is most people are making one BIG mistake when it comes to their pages.  More on that in a minute.  First let me give you an overview on what I’m going to talk about today…. What Are Fan Pages? Why Are They Important? Who Can Build A Fan Page Who Should Build A Fan Page The “Big Mistake” So Many People Are Making How To Build A Good Fan Page What Are Facebook Fan

80% of Google Buzz Powered by Bots & Feeds

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Google Buzz may be a centralized microblogging system, but for the most part, its not run by humans .. instead; robots. What better way for Google to gain access to real time Twitter data (if Microsoft ever buys Twitter and blocks Google access) than have Google users run auto tweeted material through Buzz? PostRank has an interesting study on the percentage of Buzz that is powered by feeds and bots. Turns out, approximately 60% of the content on Buzz is from Twitter! Many users have hooked up their accounts to automatically repost their content from Twitter either directly, through FriendFeed, or via another service. The runner up to Twitter? Another set of bots! This time, it’s automated alerts from feeds, e.g. CNN publishes a new story and a bot pushes it out to the Buzz stream. All in all, those two sources account for almost 90% of the Buzz stream, and even in the remainder there is a long tail of Google Latitude updates, ping.fm, and others. Unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be much original and/or human-generated content in Buzz. For one, I’d like to see a comparison between Buzz and Twitter on these stats, but for the most part, this is what I expected out of Buzz … another version of Friendfeed. How about you? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 80% of Google Buzz Powered by Bots &

Twitter Valuation Infographic

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I love infographics, for obvious reasons. One, they are easy to scan, read and understand. Two, from a marketing and publishing perspective, infographics are easy to pass around, retweet and can go viral. Here is one I saw today on Darren Rowse’s Twitip on the History of Twitter’s Valuation . This is hot hot stuff icon smile Twitter Valuation Infographic Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Twitter Valuation

Mind Your Neck and Stop Knocking Promoted Tweets

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So Twitter’s got a big – whoo-pished! – backlash after announcing they will be launching promoted tweets. I’m seeing twitter users saying that it will turn Twitter into a male enhancement and teeth whitening spam box; it wont work and threatening to leave the platform; and quote unquote ‘experts’ claim it is not much of an innovative idea. Here’s an adage, which may bring some light to the issue: KISS – Keep It Simple Shithead. Twitter may have had all type of creative ideas on the table; ‘Oh, lets have advertisers pay for tweet in 3-D that will smack fire out the user until he pays attention. hmm; its going to cost a Wall Street Stimulus package and the resurrection of Thomas Edison to develop – lets just go with promoted tweets.” Promoted tweets will be posted and will only be allowed to stay on the site if people reply, retweet, or favorite it; This is like the user-voted ads on Digg and sponsored posts written by the editorial staff @ Gawker and Federated Media. This is what spurred the buzz around the launch of Google Adwords – ads displayed based on relevance 1. the amount of money paid 2. the amount of times people clicked on the ads. God bless Google. The only thing I see is that the Google Adwords algo can’t be as easily manipulated because you have to pay for each click; will Twitter charge for retweets, favorites and replies – spam popups of teeth with black craters? Will these charges ad to positive ROI; The only thing i see on which twitter could improve, is only letting big name companies like Starbucks, & Virgin America play first. Big brands are big brands – Richard Branson could fart and people would follow him and do as he tweets; where if a small business owner were to fart, she would just clear out the elevator and get wacked upside the head with a purse by the lady who couldn’t exit the elevator because the batteries in her power scooter died. I would recommend to also open it up to the mom&pops; the internet is built on the creative spirit of everybody that can hit buttons on the keyboard. Like with Google, once the mom&pop pig farm drops a case study on how they’re selling more mail-orders of fresh-cut bacon and chicharron, that’s when everybody will want a piece and start to throw money at promoted tweets – think long-tail Twitter – the short tail’s still looking for penis enlargement just to keep up. And for any marketers that are criticizing this move – shame on you! You know that you have to hunt for a marketing campaign that slaps some cash on the table; solely found through trial & error; let the Twitter boys and girls experiment – if you’re focusing on building your brand instead of branding every other social media website spending too much time on them; you should be alright. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Mind Your Neck and Stop Knocking Promoted

Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan – Part 1: Defining KPIs

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Last week I spoke at PubCon South on the Analytics Strategy panel on the topic of social media. This is something I’m very passionate about and during my preparation for the presentation I uncovered some scary statistics. According to a survey conducted by BazaarVoice in 2009, on average businesses have no idea what their ROI is on any type of social media activity: Here are a few of the lowlights highlights 53% of respondents are unsure about their return on Twitter 50% are unsure about the direct value of LinkedIn 50% are not sure how to measure the impact on business metrics from blogs And yet, companies now-a-days have no problem investing thousands of dollars into social media marketing even if they have no idea if they’ll profit from it. Why have companies gotten so lazy when it comes to marketing spend? Part of the problem is they aren’t properly analyzing their data. Social networks are giving us more and more insight into visitor and performance metrics, but most of us aren’t properly setup to find actionable insights on the campaign’s performance. This series of posts will explain how to properly setup your social media strategy so that you can make better-informed decisions, understand your ROI and adjust your strategy according to the numbers. Let’s get started. Before you do anything else, you need to have a clear understanding of what your goal will be and how you will measure the success of your social media strategy. In other words, we need to define KPIs. There are a couple of guidelines you should follow when definining KPIs: Choose metrics that actually translate into business context (e.g. sales, new leads, customer satisfaction, customer interaction, etc.) Define more than just attention metrics (You want to look at more important metrics than just your fan/follower count) Define KPIs that are actionable (How does knowing what your retweet reach is help you adjust your Twitter strategy?) Create specific KPIs for each social network and specific elements of your website The most important guideline above is to define actionable KPIs. Obviously these types of KPIs are going to be unique to your business, but here are a few examples of what I would consider good actionable KPIs: Number of people in a specific location who follow your company on Twitter Reduction in sales cycles Reduction in support costs Increase in product reviews Product improvement suggestions from [specific social network] If you’d like more KPI ideas, I highly recommend you buy Jim Sterne’s new book, “ Social Media Metrics ” where he has over 100 KPIs listed in the first few pages of the book. Now that we have your KPIs established, we need to configure your analytics. I’ll walk you through that process in part 2 of Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan – Part 1: Defining