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Twitter launches follow button for websites
In my last posts I discussed about the expansion of twitter. How and why they acquired tweetdeck. They are about to launch their own photosharing services. Now they have launched twitter follow button for websites which enables users to subscribe to the twitter feeds of organisations and individuals directly from their websites with a single click.
Till now website had to redirect users to their respective twitter page on twitter.com before users can follow them. This new feature of follow button will definitely encourage organisations/individuals to increase the number of their followers by “follow us” prompts on their sites.
So, we can say that twitter has gone one step ahead by launching this new feature of twitter button.
If you want to know more or want to set up a twitter button for your own website you can go here.
Twitter & Tweetdeck, Nice combination?
After hearing the rumours of acquisition for several months now, finally it was made official that Tweetdeck will be joining Twitter.
I am using Tweetdeck, a desktop and mobile application for organising tweets and other social media in handy columns, from last 2 years. And let me admit that I am a big fan of Tweetdeck. TweetDeck, which was launched in 2009, is an Adobe Air-based applicationfrom which not only allows to organize tweets but also the other social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and others.
TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth, said in his blog, “By becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active, and anyone that just needs ‘more power”.
TweetDeck is the most popular third party application for twitter, which is easy to use and extremely user friendly. So, I believe that its a great combination with twitter. People are fond of twitter & tweetdeck, which are now coming under the same umbrella.
Hope to see more of twitter and tweetdeck in the coming time.
Share your views.
Social media strategy does not require hefty budget!
Its a general notion that creating and launching a high impact social media campaign require a good amount of budget along with so called social media experts, an army of software developers or a team of SEO people.
Well, these are just misconceptions. You don’t need to spend lacs of rupees to get good follower on twitter or get a decent number of fans on facebook page. However it only requires an involving social media strategy which revolves around the target audience. Your facebook page or twitter background may not require to be highly colorful and technologically advance but it should be appealing and interactive.
The content should be engaging, short and to the point. Videos should be shorter in length. It’s always good to initiate and encourage conversation over the social media rather than just posting your content and not thinking about the interest, expectation and taste of your target audience.
So instead of wasting your time and money on frantically responding to tweets, wall posts, and reading about the social media tools, techniques, and trends of tomorrow focus on your target audience, their preferences, your content, engagement level and of course simplicity.
Share your views.
Think before you post on social media
Posting irrelevant, obscene content over the social media is not an acceptable way to get noticed and appreciated. I unfriend/unfollow people who talk nonsense, anti-semite or antisocial way. So one should take care of the content/pic before posting on social media otherwise it may also attract some unfavourable repercussions.
Before you post or send anything that may be inflammatory or controversial, give yourself some time to analyze its consequences. Try and think how your communication will be viewed by your friends and relatives present on social media.
Do not respond to or initiate inflammatory language, and resist replying immediately to anything you do receive of this nature. Give yourself a some time to to ponder on content and your response to it. You also can consider getting the perspective of someone you trust before responding to these provocative and unsocial content.
Don’t let your frustration to go on social media. This is just a temporary state of mind, don’t make it permanent by posting on social media. In fact take correspondence as business- ike and straight to the point, rather than emotional and frustration.
So, control your thoughts before you start interacting in social media.
Now Osama malware scam (virus)
Computer security experts warned that online scammers may seek to exploit the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to spread malware. May be because of this since mornign I have received many emails suggesting me not to open any email attachment named as “BLACK MUSLIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE”. They are suggesting it is a malware and can harm the comupters. The email says:
In the coming days, DO NOT open any message with an attachment called: BLACK MUSLIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE , regardless of who sent it to you. It is a virus that opens an Olympics torch that burns the whole hard disk C of your computer. This virus EVEN IF IT comes from a known person who you have in your list.
However this is just a hoax mail. There is no virus named as ‘BLACK MUSLIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE’. Mcafee has updated about this hoax emai viurs on their website. As per Mcafee:
This email message is just a HOAX. It contains no malicious scripts or malware. McAfee Avert Labs has not received any report of a user’s hard drive being erased from opening the email.
You can read more about this on Mcafee website.
7 rules before you start engaging in Social Media
Almost every organization has started to get involved in social media. Because social media creates an important link between business and customers and the decision makers. Before you start engaging you should have set of rules ready. Your employees should be trained enough to handle social media along with its predictable and unforeseen circumstances. Apart from that one should do his homework before taking decision to represent your company in social media.
You should consider the following points:
1. Research – Where is your target audience apart from facebook and twitter. Identify which other sites/forums/community are most popular with your audience. Are they present on LinkedIn, which groups, subgroups. The more time you put in research, the less time you have to put in execution.
2. Create a memorable profile – Spend good time in profile creation. Apart from logo and URL you should have comprehensive and interesting description about your company. So the targeted people can relate themselves with your company. Use the same information, photo and logo for all your profiles. So that people who meet you at one site will be able to easily connect with you at another.
3. Listen before your speak– Once your profile is ready, don’t straightaway jump into the conversation with a sales pitch, and start hitting people with messages/promotions. Instead, spend some time in reading messages, status, tweets, posts etc. So that you can make out what product/service they are taking about, what is their problem area, which topics are interesting, what people like to talk about etc.
4. Interaction is the key – The main idea behind people visit social sites is to seek some diversion from their routine work, some entertainment, discuss their favourite topics, socializing with friends etc. So, don’t start straightaway pitching your products/services. Interact with them, share your views, opinions, build rapport and be on the same page before you start any promotions.
5. Be humble and polite – Its always good to be gracious and thankful. Address people by name. Reply/follow up on their comments.
6. Watch what you say – The internet has a long memory. Put the right content in social media. Don’t put obscene, unethical (copyrighted) content just to get attention. Also think before you make any promises to satisfy an irate customer or promoting your brand.
7. Abide to community guidelines – Every community, social media has certain rules/guidelines. You can’t straightaway post web links or promote your product etc. Abide by them. Participate in conversation and be one of them and then smartly perform your promotion activity.
I am sure these points will be helpful for you if you are planning to execute your social media presence.
You can read my earlier blogposts on social media strategy and give your feedback:
Convert facebook profile into a business page
Now you can convert a facebook profile into a business page. Where people can ‘like’ your page instead of sending friend requests. This will be beneficial for business people who originally created a wrong type of profile but now they can move to a more business/profession friendly facebook page.
However the profiles which will be converted will lose much of their data. Because only the profile photos and friends will be moved to the new page. No other content like albums, updates etc. will be moved to new page.
The idea behind offering this conversion into business page is that business page offers more robust features in comparison to the individual profile. Like integrate with RSS feed, build custom application, create a customized welcome page, interaction friendly etc.
As of now people are finding this conversion a bit tedious. The migration tool makes you the admin for the page which you wish to migrate. And the original user profile is deleted by Facebook during the migration. In this process of transition some people have also lost some of their data. However this is very rare and facebook is working hard to sort this issue out.
You can read more about the facebook page migration at facebook.com/help
4 KPIs for your social media strategy
In my last post I discussed about 10 reasons as why companies should be on social media.
The ultimate idea behind being on social media is to tap/interact with more customers to get more sales and generate more revenue with less cost. You are investing time, money, and other resources on social media marketing to add more value to your company. You should also go through the review process and answer some basic question like, are you getting benefit out of your social media strategy in terms of more revenue, customers, brand awareness, customer satisfaction etc. If your social media presence not yielding desired results then its a time to revamp your strategy. But the question is that how to gauge the performance of your social media strategy?
Following points can be considered to evaluate your social media strategy:
1. Set measurable KPIs
You can define specific parameters to evaluate the outcomes of social networking websites. So that you know what social networking sites you need to focus. You can observe:
- Location-wise target audience attached to your social presence.
- No. of feedback/reviews/suggestions/complaints.
- Any reduction in your support cost due to social presence.
- Any increments in sales.
2. Set up your analytics
In order to identify which activity of yours attracting the customers and at which platform, you should track the source of visitors to your website/leads/sales. You can do this in many ways:
- Set up google analytics so that you know incoming links/source to your website and also can see the top content viewed.
- Study ‘Weekly facebook page update’ to analyze the weekly activity on your facebook page.
- Set up google alerts for the keywords related to your business/products so that you know who is creating buzz and how.
- Use twitter search to get relevant info regarding mentions, discussions about you, products, competitors etc. You can use tools like twilert, tweetbeep etc. to monitor the twitter activity.
- Use other social analytics tools like socialmention, backtype, thinkup etc.
3.Measure each social network individually
Each platform has different parameters so that you can gauge your performance. You can analyze your performance week by week. Here, I am talking about 2 major Platforms i.e. facebook and twitter:
- Facebook: Observe ‘likes’ to your page, new likes, page views, interactions, comments, location of fans, impression of your posts etc.
- Twitter: Total followers, no. of tweets, average tweets per day, no. of clicks, mentions, retweets, what content get you more followers or more clicks etc.
4. Revisit your strategy
Till now you must be having an idea about what is working for you and what is not. Its time to answer some of the question:
- Should you publish more often or decrease the frequency?
- Did your target audience like the content?
- Are you building/encouraging the interaction?
- What your competitors are doing? You may have to adopt some part of it.
- Do you need to revise your goal?
Outcomes of every activity should be monitored to know the performance effectiveness. Time, money and resources which we are investing in social media strategy should fillip brand and business.
How twitter was founded-The real story!
In just five years Twitter is now worth more than $5 billion. Twitter has achieved this milestone in a very short span of time. And this success story is very fascinating. On the internet I read many versions of this story. Most of them speak about a professional and well drafted version. However the real story is bit different. It tells about many people who were not given their due credit. It tells about how in September 2006(Just before the success of twitter) Evan Williams buy back shares from his investors. Its a very interesting story actually.
You can read the complete story here – http://goo.gl/tk5PR
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