Social Media

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. 🙂