Social Media

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.

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.

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.”]

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

People 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.

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.

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.

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. 🙂

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?