Posts Tagged ‘help’

The Internet is a great place to find neat little tips and tricks for building a social media marketing strategy; but blog posts and quick fix guides can only help you so much in building a long-term plan. To bridge the gap between the blog posts you find online and your long-term plans, it helps if you have one guide you can refer back to and make sure you’re staying on track with your aims.

Do a quick search on Amazon and you’ll see there are over 5,000 results for “social media marketing” in books, and this doesn’t even include the Kindle store! Here’s a quick round-up of some of the top social media marketing books, based on my humble opinion and the genuine user reviews I’ve found.

Likeable

As the title suggests, this book is all about gaining popularity across your social media networks in an honest and transparent way. The author, Dave Kerpen is the CEO of likeable media, and has worked with the likes of Neutrogena and Penguin on their social media efforts, so you know you’re getting some real first-hand experience within the pages of this book.

Kerpen’s style is effortlessly readable and easily digested. He fleshes out his great advice with some real life examples which help to further drive his point home.

This book is great for those wanting an over-arching reference bible to help with everything from outreach to crisis management. It’s received 5 star reviews across the board on Amazon.

Social Media Marketing For Dummies

This book claims to be 8 books in 1, although by this they simply mean that there are 8 sections to the book. It covers everything, and I mean everything, and trusts you to skim over anything that isn’t relevant to you. This book is great if you want to be taken, hand-in-hand, through every aspect of social media, right from the definitions to the more nitty gritty.

My only concern about this book was the apparent lack of social media presence of the authors. It receieved 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon and great reviews: “Perfect book for a beginner in social marketing.”

This is Social Media

Written by industry leader Guy Clapperton, This is Social Media is the perfect addition to any social media strategy. Whether you’re already up and running and want to streamline your technique, or if you need a full out of the box guide, Clapperton has it covered!

“You might already be social networking on Facebook, or even microblogging on Twitter. One thing’s for sure though; you’re too busy to muck about on these sites all day, not really knowing how to get any decent play out of them. You’re looking for profitability, not gimmicks.”

As a journalist, Clapperton has been using social media for businesses since he went freelance in 1993.

500 Social Media Marketing Tips

This is more of a dip in and out guide aimed at offering new ideas and perspectives to those already running a social media marketing campaign.

Again, I was concerned about the lack of social media presence behind the book, as it would seem the author, Andrew Macarthy (No, not that one!) fails to practice what he preaches on his own social networks. That said, this really is a top-notch book and well deserving of the 4.9 star reviews on Amazon.

If you get your RT’s mixed up with your HT’s, you nod politely when people mention API’s, and the phrase ‘astroturfing’ leaves you perplexed, then allow me to demystify some of the slang and jargon floating around the Social Media Marketing realm.

Facebook

App - A phrase that was popularized by Apple, ‘app’ stands for application. In Facebook terms, apps can be added to a profile and used in various ways. Unlike a program, it won’t be installed on your computer, but instead stays on your browser.

API - ‘Application Programing Interface’, an API makes it possible to use a program within a program. An example of this would be embedding a Twitter feed into your website.

‘Cover Photo’ - The top banner on a Facebook Time Line. If you’re making a custom photo the dimensions are 851 x 315 px. Otherwise, sites like thesitecanvas.com will allow you to make custom cover pictures.

‘News Feed’ - A chronological feed composed of updates from your friends. If you manage a Facebook page then your feed will only be composed of updates from other Pages that you ‘like’.

‘Time Line’ – The recently updated version of Facebook profiles, these give an overview of a users Facebook activity in a two column responsive layout.

Twitter

RT - Retweet, old style or new style, retweeting is re-sharing a tweet with your followers while giving credit to the original owner, usually with a @mention. An old style RT will quote the tweet and clearly state ‘RT’. Twitter made it easier to RT with the new style ‘Retweet’ button.

HT - Hat tip, usually used when you want to give credit to the source, even if you weren’t directly influenced by a Tweet.

OH - Overheard. Used for sharing funny overheard snippets or the occasional rumour.

#FF – Short for follow Friday, a way to let other users know who is worth following.

Instagram – Most commonly used wit Twitter, Instagram is a smart phone app which allows users to apply vintage style filters to their photographs.

Blogging and General

RSS reader – the most useful invention ever. A ‘Really Simple Syndication’ compiles news and articles from all of your favourite sources, allowing you to quickly scan headlines for interesting juice.

Astroturfing – building the illusion of a ‘grassroots’ social media campaign. While the phrase originally applied to political campaigns, social media looks like it will be the next to be hit. Followers are often tricked by false reviews or user interaction.

Occasionally, a news story will show up in your news feed that will leave you staring at your computer screen in disbelief. And I’m not talking about the who’s dating whom stories, or what’s going to happen in next weeks Coronation Street. When the headline “Facebook Privacy Controls Ignored by 13 Million Users” cropped up in my Google reader, I genuinely couldn’t believe a word I was reading. Are there really than many of the Facebook population oblivious to the dangers to sharing too much information? Really.

According to the report by Consumer Reports, this is exactly the case, with 13 million Facebook users in the US alone unaware of, or ignoring, privacy settings. Consumer Reports technology editor Jeff Fox had this to say:

“Our investigation revealed some fascinating, and some disquieting trends, but ones always worth knowing for consumers who wish to keep their personal data under better control”

So why exactly to privacy settings matter?

Imagine this scenario, you’ve just moved in to a new house, you’re excitedly snapping pictures of your front door and local to share with friends on Facebook. You organise a housewarming party, and give your friends the address on a public event. Then you plan a weekend away and tweet about ‘how many sleeps’ till you’ll be jetting off somewhere sunny. And while you’re away, someone helps themselves to all your stuff.

Likewise, in the US, if you shared or liked a health condition or treatment information page , this could spell trouble when it comes to getting health insurance.

So how do you lock down your data to keep yourself covered?

If you’re curious, Facebook will now allow you to download all of the information you have stored on the website in one convenient zip file (be careful with this file!) This will no doubt be an eye-opener when you discover exactly how much you’ve been sharing with the world.

Head straight to your Facebook account and click on the ‘privacy settings’ option on the top right. Facebook has made it easy to either bulk protect your content, or customise it as you wish.You can select from ‘Public’, ‘Friends’, or ‘Custom’.

If you’ve recently been thrown in to Timeline, you may want to limit your old posts, which will be a bulk action applied to all older posts.

Also, be sure to keep checking which apps you still allow access to your Facebook data. If you haven’t used it in 3 months, you probably won’t use it again, so it would be advisable to revoke the access.

via: V3

Twitter can be an overwhelming place – it’s fast paced and ever-changing – but there are huge benefits to be found there once you tumble down the rabbit hole and start to get to grips with the huge community.

Although it seems basic compared to Facebook or Google+, Twitter is surprisingly functional. Team it up with a good desktop programme like TweetDeck and you’ll have all the ingredients for increasing your reach and influence.

Twitter Lists is one of the slightly hidden and vastly under-used tools which every Social Media Marketer should be using. Once you hit the 500 following mark, your Twitter feed is going to leave you feeling like you’re constantly playing catch up. How on earth can you ever be part of that conversation when it’s happening faster that you can read?

One way is to use Lists and TweetDeck to bunch the people you follow into groups. Be warned, that these lists are public, so be careful what you name it. Once you have your lists built you can then set up columns in TweetDeck to only show tweets from those people. And hey presto, you’ll have an easier time following and interacting with those most important to you.

You can also use lists to follow groups of people without actually following them. So you can still retweet influential people without hugely increasing the number of people you follow.

Here are some influential people with interesting lists:

Robert Scoble – highly influential in the tech world, and with a vast array of lists for you to follow.

Stephen Fry, needs no introduction. Check out the lists he is included in for similarly influential and RT worthy people.

Arianna Huffington – Great for news and politics lists.

Randi Zuckerberg – ex Facebook marketing and current media queen, great lists including SMM, Women in Tech, and PR/ Marketing.

Now that Pinterest has finally sorted out some of their dubious terms of service – and have agreed not to sell content which we have no copyright control over and then throw us under the bus when it goes wrong – we can finally pin with an easy conscience. Phew!

If, like me, you like to have a little method to your social media efforts, then here are some top tips for finding pins, people and prettifying (I needed another P!) your pinterest profile.

I’m a big fan of the masonry jQuery which makes Pinterest so beautiful – it’s dynamic and makes content slide together with ease, so don’t make this layout work against you. Your pins will be resized width ways, but there’s no limit to the height, which works incredibly well for infographics. That said, not many people will scroll all the way to the bottom to see the full graphic and then scroll back up to re-pin. Keep you Pins at a decent height to avoid this problem.

If you’re looking for potential followers, the best thing you can do is put yourself out there and interact. Easier said than done, as you probably don’t want to be trawling content looking for interesting users. If you regularly pin from a specific site; mashable for example, then you can see content which other people are pinning from this source too.

http://pinterest.com/source/mashable.com

And it works for any website, providing people have been pinning from it. It’s also a good way to check if your site has been getting any pins.

And finally, hashtags work on Pinterest too – or you can just search using any term. It’s interesting to note that capitalisation matters on Pinterest; so #tech, tech and Tech will produce different results.