Vinny O'Hare

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Social Media

Hootsuite Bulk Uploader Date Changer

I use Hootsuite a lot for scheduling my social media post. I have a few spreadsheets that I upload every month with 30-50 items in each and when the month changes to the next month I have to go into my Google Drive (Never use Excel with Hootsuite) and open the spreadsheet. One of the things you would think is that you can just do a simple search and replace and change the month. Normally you would think that would work but what ends up happening is the days of the week also get messed up.

Let’s say I am going from July to August. I would open the spreadsheet and go EDIT > Search and Replace and change the date from 7/ to 8/. Well it works fine but it also changes the date on the 7th, 17th, and 27th of the month to the 8th, 18th, and 28th. Needless to say that if you don’t fix this the spreadsheet will have errors in it when you upload it via the Hootsuite bulk upload tool because the post are not in order date anymore and the times will get messed up.

Hootsuite Bulk Uploader Solution

Hootsuite Bulk Uploader solutionAfter months of struggling with this I finally figured out a solution. In the find and replace box add a caret (That funny thing above the 6 key on your keyboard) in the find section. Then scroll down and check off match case and search using regular expressions. You should then be able to look at your csv file and notice that the dates for the 7th, 17th, and 28th hasn’t changed at all.

Save the file as a csv and you are good to go. Then make the same changes the next month. This will save you valuable time using the bulk upload tool.

 

Social Media Planning in Advance

I often get asked about how I do my social media post scheduling. One of my worst kept secrets is I use the Hootsuite bulk uploader. I am a Hootsuite Ambassador and love talking about all the features they have. I will be talking about this more at my Affiliate Summit roundtable session if you will be in Las Vegas I encourage you to come hear the exact steps I use. I am a set up once and rinse a repeat type of guy and the Hootsuite bulk uploader lets me do this. In my case I use a monthly bulk upload plan.

Hootsuite has a video on this that you can see in the first post below. Odds are you saw this post because it was shared on social media. 🙂

hootsuite schedule post image
Here’s how to schedule tweets with Hootsuite’s Twitter scheduler. Schedule Twitter messages easily today!

Of course having a plan and taking stock of what works and more important what doesn’t work is important. I will take my most popular social media post and reschedule them and take the non performers out or add a hashtag to it to make the post better. Below is a few templates that you can use.

social template pic
Social media is a relatively new tool for most businesses. This means that, unlike many other marketing tools, when people begin to build out social media for their business, they’re starting from scratch. They haven’t created social media strategies before or they don’t know what questions to ask for a social media audit, and finding out can be both difficult and time consuming.

We all know that social media post get more traction when there is an image involved in the post. Below you will find some new tools to make your images stand out.

Are you getting maximum results from your visual content? Do you use fonts, colors and clever effects to make your company’s images more recognizable? Graphics that are consistent with your company’s established image increase your audience engagement by creating familiarity. In this article you’ll discover how to use simple design tactics to help your audience instantly associate your pictures with your brand.

Speaking at Author Marketing Live

Vinny O'Hare at author Marketing live graphic

Just putting on the finishing touches to our presentation for Author Marketing Live. Debbie and I are doing a presentation called “Fast & Easy Ways To Find True Fans & Rabid Readers with Social Media” which I have to say I am quite proud of.

I have about 4 or 5 tips that will help authors save time when using social media while building a fan base that will want to read their books. While I can’t say exactly what these tools are I can say that it will be a sold out audience and we are prepared to have authors sitting there with their eyes wide open and writing down the tips we are giving them.

It will be my first time in Cleveland unless you count the 2 minutes I spent there changing planes once. If you are going to be there I look forward to seeing you, please come up and say Hi!

If you waited to long and didn’t get a ticket I suggest you follow the hashtag #AMLive14 as I will be tweeting from the stage. Well not really since I set up the tweets to go out last week.

Extend Facebook Reach With One Button

I was talking with a buddy online and he was telling me how his Facebook reach was going down and down and down. At first I gave him a few tips on how to increase it and then I told him why not put your Hootsuite tweet sheet in and push the same tweets to Facebook as you are putting on Twitter. I talked a little about this in my Twitter post last week.

Of course I would not do this all the time but for the sake of testing I did it myself with one of my sites. I pulled out my monthly Twitter sheet I have set up for Hootsuite and deleted the first 9 rows and saved it and uploaded it using the bulk upload tool in Hootsuite. As you can see below I expanded my reach with no problem. This was only posting 2 more times a day.

Expand Facebook Reach

Now if I was to do this seriously I would have a longer Tweet sheet than having the normal 140 characters. Maybe take a snippet of content out of a page and link it back to that page. Odds are the image for the post would get pulled automatically from the page?

If you are using Hootsuite and the bulk uploader why not give this a try! For people that are familiar with the tool already this could be set up in a matter of 1 minute pushing one button.

[Tweet “My Facebook reach has been off the charts since doing this.”]

What Twitter Has Become To Me

This past week I have seen a ton of people going back and seeing their first tweet since it was Twitter’s 8th anniversary. Twitter set up a special url for you to go see what your tweet was. If you are curious about it you can check yours out here.

As I was looking through my account I started to think about how much my opinion of Twitter has changed. I was very vocal when it came to them putting “Paid Tweets” on the site. I was even mentioned on the NY Times website. My thoughts have changed since I think Twitter has so many users that have given up on the service that it has just become a broadcast platform to a degree.

Scheduled Tweets

Schedule tweets in bulkPeople get so upset over scheduled tweets it cracks me up. Sure sometimes breaking news happens and a scheduled tweet goes out. Does anyone notice? Does anyone care? Isn’t there much bigger things in life to worry about? I just got finished scheduling about 2000 tweets. Some are evergreen, some are funny, some are interactive, some are informative, and some are tweets to landing pages that are designed for sales.

I break them up and most go out in the early morning so when I get up I already have interaction to respond to. I also schedule some for my European audience, which has been some of the best interaction I get. Guess being a night owl helps with that.

I am guessing that the 140 characters are too limiting to have a meaningful conversation especially if you are using Twitter on the web. I use Hootsuite where I can filter people into a list. I don’t have to see tweets from everyone I follow. I keep a few private list set up and keep track and respond to my @ messages. Between that and the RavenTools social monitor I can keep up and track everything in all the social media accounts I am responsible for.

Hootsuite has a bulk upload tool that is simple to use. A simple csv file with 3 rows and hit what social media accounts you want to post to and you are done. I recommend using Google docs to set up the CSV file, for some reason it doesn’t play nice in excel.

I use the bulk upload tool to upload to Twitter and also to Facebook and G+. Sometimes I set up different files for each but you can blast the same message out to all 3 if you want. If you hook up some apps in Hootsuite you can blast out to even more places. I concentrate on the big 3 social networks for the most part.

Using the schedule in bulk tool in Hootsuite makes life so much easier. You can sign up for a free account but I use the pro account for the features.  It is well worth it for me.

Add a Call To Action Near Your Social Media Buttons

I was just browsing Facebook when I saw a post from New Media Expo about the decline in organic Facebook results when it came to new posts. They highlighted a writer (Andrea Vahl) that did a 24 hour experiment on organic post where she posted to Facebook asking for people to like the post so she could judge organic traffic.  Andrea Vahl went on to show graphs and while her experiment is still going on as I write this it made me think.

Since we are always talking about call to actions why not add a line of text near your social media buttons asking the reader to click and share the post. I am sure just adding a line or two will help with the organic reach in Facebook, plus whatever benefits comes along with Google tracking social media now. It just doesn’t hurt to ask.

At first I was going to add a line in the after post section but then I looked closer at the social media sharing plugin that I use Sharing is caring Wordpress plugin. It has a section to add a line of text so I did. This is what it looks like. I am sure you will also see it at the bottom of the post.

social media call to action

I am sure I am going to change it up when I think of something better and do some A/B testing on it. Inside the plugin is where you ad the text. You can see in the extended options where I circled in green.

Sharing blog post

You can also change the CSS and other settings if you choose to do so. For now I will leave it as it is. I will probably do some testing of calls to action across my other sites and track the results. For now I suggest adding a line if having people sharing your post is a goal of yours.  Go ahead and follow the instructions below and share the post. 🙂

Knowem Social Media Optimizer Tool

I just got a look at Knowem’s Social Media Optimizer tool and I was amazed at how many of my websites are not fully optimized for social media. You get to see all the details that your site should be doing when it comes to social media. I encourage you to put one of your websites into the url field and see what you are missing.

Without a doubt this new social media tool from Knowem will help you improve your website when it comes to social media data that your site is telling the search engines. You will see what you can improve when it comes to your site details on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. It will also show you some stats when it comes to local if your site is local based and some SEO mistakes you may improve upon.

Social Media is a Waste Of Time

Ok now that I have your attention you need to read further. Social media is one of the best ways to get traffic to your website but you have to have tracking installed so you can track what you are doing and the response you are getting. Below you can see my report of my Twitter account. I get this daily as part of my Raven Tools report.
Track twitter

I normally only track one month at a time and have it versus the previous month. This report shows two months worth of data though. At first you may look at this and say OMG Vinny you had over 1000 post in the time. That is correct about 500 a month, but when you factor in that about 700 are automatic I only did about 300 post in two months. Most of my tweets were during Affiliate Summit. I really didn’t do much tweeting at all.

The number to look at here though is the amount of re-tweets. For very little effort I get RT’s on my post like crazy. That is the goal so that I get new followers and I can funnel them towards my email newsletter list. You can also see that I get a lot of other mentions and that is just fine by me. Lets break it down even further. In the graph below you will see that I track post, mentions, and events.

What I do is when I make a post on my site I create an event so I can track it. This is the dark gray lines on the chart below. I can see what post received traffic and more important what post didn’t see traffic. By looking at this I can see that my post on 8/9 and 9/6 worked well on Twitter. I need to go in and see what they were and find a similar topic to write about.

Twitter tracking

The main thing is that I track every single thing I do when it comes to social media. If you look above you can see my follow 500 people experiment in full effect also. The results of that aren’t in yet since I am waiting on some more figures. I also get reports on Facebook and G+ that look just like this.  I have this report emailed to me every morning along with the rest of my Raven Report.

Do you know what you are doing on social media? Are you just posting to Facebook and Twitter praying that something will get retweeted? That isn’t a good idea and is probably a waste of time.

Getting Your Video To Go Viral

A few years ago when I bought my first smartphone I figured I would make a little video on how I can watch NFL games from my phone. Little did I know that by using “Direct TV on the Droid Phone” I was tapping into something that was to go viral. I shouldn’t say viral I should say it got a lot of traffic. When I made the video (Which Sucks BTW) I didn’t do any keyword research before I named it. You should always do that to help with traffic. This video has 41,000 views and it could of had more.

Now I did no promoting for this video and actually forgot all about it until I started seeing traffic in my Google analytics to my cell phone site which was in the description at the time. Every week I would see a few hundred hits from the text link in the description box to my site. When they clicked on the link it gave them a text wrap up of what I said in the video. I also embedded the video on the bottom of that page in case anyone wanted to see it again.

My cell phone site was an old looking frontpage made site that is currently being redesigned so in the mean time I changed the video to link back to my site where those people now end up seeing the pictures I take with the cell phone. It is only a stop gap measure until I get the cell phone site back up.

Use The Reply Button On Your Videos

What I learned about the video though is that when someone ask you a question on the video you should reply. People end up liking the video and the video gets ranked higher on YouTube based on the action. From now on I will always reply back to people no matter what their crazy question is.

People will end up subscribing to your channel and sharing your videos. You always want to put your videos in the best places to get the most views.

After you make a video you should also embed it on a new post on your site so it goes out to your newsletter subscribers. Tweet out that page a few times and tweet out the page it is on YouTube also. The more plays you get the more YouTube notices its popularity and that helps with rankings. Send an email to your friends and ask them to watch it. Bribe them and tell them there is a surprise ending or something.  You should also place the link to your page on Facebook and G+. In a few days go in and do the same thing with the YouTube page that your video is on.

Do not upload the video to Facebook as that won’t help you with visitors back to your page.

Before you upload the video to YouTube you should rename the file name. Instead of uploading 21312312312323.mov you want to call it something like watchtvonphone.mov and help Google find it better. You also want to add a few paragraphs of text in the description field with a relevant website url somewhere so the viewer can click on it and be on your website.

Sharing Your Post

At Affiliate Summit I was talking to an affiliate that was telling me that he didn’t have a real social media plan. I told him I know that he didn’t because I was on his site a few days before. It was then that I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.

He had all the social media buttons on the site but they all showed 0 clicks on them. I said to myself if he didn’t think the post were good enough to share why the heck would I share his post. When I told the affiliate about this he looked at me like wow I never thought of that. Not saying that having 1 click will help you but if no one knows the post exist in the first place it has 0 chance of getting spread.

I am sure someone that reads this will say no wonder why no one is using the social media buttons on my site! They are not using them because they never saw your post in the first place. Every time I write a blog post I will take 3 minutes to click on the social media buttons and share the post across the 3 or 4 social media platforms that I have buttons for on the post.

This gives me a head start and allows others that follow me a chance to see the tweet or Facebook like or whatever I have done and share it with their friends. I also suggest in the newsletter that goes out that people should use the share buttons on the bottom of the post if they like it and want to help my site get more readers. You will be amazed at the amount of social shares your post receive when you put it in your readers mind what to do when they read a post. After a few newsletters with that message your long time readers will re-tweet and like your post naturally as long as it is quality.

I also told this affiliate that he should hook up with a few bloggers that are in his niche or even in his area and team up. Having 3 or 4 bloggers helping share your post on social media when they see a new post. It is pretty simple to set up, all you have to do is sign up for each others newsletter and just use the social buttons whenever they get a new newsletter.

Since having only 1 click on a social media button isn’t that good when it comes to crowd sourcing (Which is what you want to happen) having a few buttons that show 3 or 4 clicks helps with that. After being spread on a few places by other bloggers you will end up with a few new readers that will start liking your post and you will end up with more than the 3 or 4 likes.

I see this situation a lot when someone launches a new blog. It takes a lot of work and then they make a few post and nothing happens and they get discouraged and the site ends up failing. Using this simple tip will help a new blog get its legs a little quicker.

If you have a good relationship with a few bloggers in your niche (and you should) you can set up this system very easy. You may be surprised at the results.

What is Your Social Media Workflow

You have just written the best blog post you have ever done before and you hope that someone will read it. Odds are that you have done this one time or another but don’t feel bad as we have all done it. Have you ever wondered how the big named blogs get their readership? It isn’t from waiting for hope to kick in, most of them have a plan.

Next time a site catches your eye and you notice it across all your social media try to dissect it and figure out how they do it. Once you get a plan in place you can have your post spread like wildfire across your social media just like the pros do it. There is no right or wrong way to do this but here is some of what I do when I put a post on this site.

You will notice the social share buttons on the bottom of every post on this site. This is a free WordPress plugin called Sociable.

In the plugin you have the choice of after the post or a skyscraper. I don’t like sites with social buttons on the side. I am not going to move my mouse up to the right or left to share content. I also want to give the user something to do after they read my post. After I post the blog post I will usually go across and hit each button and post it on the social networks. This takes a total of 5 minutes.

I also have an automated system in place. Most of it is done through the rss feed. When I set up a post it automatically goes out to my email newsletter list using Aweber. When setting up in Aweber there is also a place to send to the Twitter account I have associated with that account. There is also a place to have it send to your Facebook fan page. This is two places less that you have to put your message in manually but I do it anyway. I usually do this right away and when the rss feed catches it will post it a few hours later.

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Google vs Facebook There is No Competition

I have been a fan of Google+ since it came out as I like the clean interface. I have not been a fan of Facebook or as I lovingly call it Spambook. Both serve a purpose for me and I consider them both as tools. While everyone and their grandmother in the tech industry likes pitting one against the other I just don’t care who will win the battle of the social networks. I already consider that game to be over but it is not what you think.

Facebook has a gazillion users I get that and Google+ has only just begun to get started but as I see it Google+ is the winner. Maybe this is the geek side of me talking but I am finding the level of interaction on Google+ to be way higher than that on Facebook. Most people use Facebook to play games and talk to the people they didn’t like in High School but for me it is just a marketing tool.
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Google+ Business Pages Cleaning Up The Internet

I am sitting here thinking about Google+ for business pages. The more I do, the more I think this is going to be used as a signal that will help clean up Google’s search engine spam and make the internet a better place at the same time.

I just set up a few business pages and as I was inserting the code they give you for the head of your pages. I noticed it contains something similar to the rel=author code that they have been trying to push on everyone. Although it is not required to use the service I am sure that Google will use this as some sort of trust factor. They would be stupid if they didn’t use it. They are tying Google+ accounts to the websites that have pages. It is too early to tell but I am sure that this could be used as a social signal in the near future.
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The First Victim of Google Plus Will Be Foursquare

If you have followed me you probably know how much I don’t like foursquare since my twitter stream was filled up with people they were announcing they are “Mayors” .  Since that post it has grown to 10 million users. Not bad but I can safely say that the first victim of the Google+ entrance into social media will be Foursquare. Sorry all you virtual mayors out there it seems you all just became lame duck politicians just wasting time.

Today Google+ which has an amazing smart phone app already announced they bought The Dealmap. The Dealmap comes with 2 million users which is 1/5th of what Foursquare has. Not a bad head start for Google+ if they add this to their app in the “Nearby” section it will destroy Foursquare.

The other night I was walking down the street in NYC and was explaining to my friend how the Google+ Android app works. As we were walking down the street I said to her that if we wanted to see what people nearby were having for dinner we could just get that information with a few clicks. Next thing I knew we found a nice vegan restaurant that had a raving review by some Google+ users.  I am sure that once Google+ decides to add a deal into the mixture it will be the end of Foursquare, at least as we know it.

Google+ at last report had about 20 million users already on Google+ This is a great starting point for advertisers that are already working with Google, I am sure that it is only a matter of time before they add deals to the Google+ smart phone app.

Thoughts?

 

 

Google+ Tips and Tricks

Since everyone is talking about Google+ I wanted to share some tips I have learned so far. This post will always be expanding as Google+ is so new there are sure to be more tips and tricks over time.

Keyboard Shortcuts in Google Stream

Scroll to the next post down – hit the “J” key

Scroll up to the next post – hit the “K'” Key

Jump to chat – hit the “Q” key

Add * before and after the message to make it BOLD

Add _ before and after the message to make it ITALIC

Add – before and after the message to make it a Strike Through

Get to the top of the page just click on the black line across the top of the screen and it will jump you up to the latest post.

Circles

To add a user to your circle you got to your circles tab and enter their email address and find them. You can then add them to a post by using their name with an @ circle in front of their name and click add to a circle.

Private Circles – I have a circle I named “Private” and have no one in the circle. When I upload a picture from the android app that I want to use for a blog post I upload the photo to the private circle. You can also use this to save text for blog post or to post to Google+ later. When I am back on the computer I can open that circle stream and my info is waiting for me to use.

Rearrange your circles – So you don’t want your circles in the order Google has them. On your main screen go up to the Circles tab and click it, then you can just left click on a circle and move it where you want. They no longer have to be arranged in alphabetical order. This was updated on July 29th 2011

Photos

After uploading a photo click on Actions then Edit photo where you can change the photo with Google’s built in set of tools. There are many options for you to use.

You can drop and drag photos from your desktop right into the stream. No need to browse your computer for a file.

Usability

To add a friends name to a post just add an @ or a + in front of their name and it will make that into a click able link to that persons profile and sends an alert to that friend if they have alerts turned on in their profile.

If you are following people that get a lot of comments on their post you can go to the top of that post and on the right hand side you will see a drop down where you can click Mute This Post. Makes Google+ much cleaner.

Profile

You can use links in your profile body and select the anchor text for SEO needs. You can also include links to all your websites or online profiles in the sidebar under links.

Profile pictures – You can add more then one photo to your profile to serve as your profile picture. You can set it up to rotate to a new picture when someone clicks on it. After you upload a profile picture you will see it. Then click on edit profile and click on change your photo and a box will appear where you can upload more pictures. Right now you have to add one at a time but I am sure Google will fix that in the future. When you see someone else’s picture on their profile click on it to see if they have added more. Need more explaining you can see a video on adding your picture to Google+

Sparks

I have been using sparks to read up on my interest.  You click on the word Sparks on the lower left sidebar and  add a topic into the search box. Then when you find a good one click on the blue “Add Interest” button and it will be saved in your side bar. I use this for keyword research for when I am writing blogs and looking for a story in the niche.

Come follow me on Google+