Six tips to improve your social Media presence
Whatever your level of aptitude with Twitter and Facebook, there are many tweaks you can make to improve your presence in the social media sphere. Here are six to get you started: 1. Encourage people to link to you Make it easy for people to like and re-tweet your content. Include Social Media buttons whenever you can and encourage them to link back to you with calls to action like “Enjoyed this? Then why not link to us!”. 2. Get your look right Social Media may be more informal than traditional business fora but you still need to make sure your brand is properly represented. Make sure your social media backgrounds, skins and themes are in your corporate colours, carry a logo and are distinctively yours. Make sure you have also posted a detailed and interesting biography or profile either as a person or as your business with links to all your relevant sites. Look professional at first glance and you will encourage many more second looks. 3. Know the netiquette This stems way back from days of online bulletin boards but is as valid in the Facebook and Twitter worlds as it still is for forums. Every site and networking will have its own rules. Some are written some less so, so it is important you study a new network before blasting in. Learn the rules and stick to them. They are there to protect you from being shot down in flames at the very worst. 4. Appreciate not replicate It is easy simply to re-tweet another’s post but your own followers will appreciate you giving it your own slant, they are after all following you. By all means credit others but if you can also rephrase it so you pitch it for your own following. 5. Be a superhero – or at least a Community Angel OK, you don’t have to wear your underpants on the outside of your trousers but being willing to help others rather than just sell your services or self-promote is a good way to develop a strong following. Advice, humour, insight are all things that help us get through our daily lives a bit easier, so if you can offer those on a regular basis you will find you become more popular and thus more able to sell your wares much easier int he long run. 6. Make social media part of your day – every day There’s little point spending weeks getting your username, branding and social media policy right and then abandoning it. See it as akin to attending a networking event: Once you are there you need to stay there and be active or you won’t get anything out of it. In fact if you don’t think you have the time to manage it properly it may be better to avoid it altogether until you do – customers will see a lack of interest and look elsewhere. If you remind yourself of just one of the above every day you will soon see your online presence improve and start getting bigger rewards from your social media efforts.
Top six social media mistakes you should avoid
The exciting, fast-moving world of social media can also be a complete and utter minefield if you’re not careful. Plenty of companies have found this out to their cost, having failed to observe basic social media etiquette in the rush to start tweeting, rack up Facebook fans or pursue potential employees on LinkedIn. It’s easy to turn a social networking opportunity into an enormous social networking own goal. So here are six of the biggest clangers we’ve seen. Allowing unfiltered updates onto your website. No matter how well your company is regarded, it’s always dangerous to publish unmoderated updates from other people directly on your website. At best, someone’s bound to sneak a tweet in which contains a rude word or two. At worst, you could end up hitting the headlines, like Vodafone did last year after a Christmas marketing campaign was hijacked by tax protesters. Using hashtags inappropriately. Hashtags are used on Twitter to organise messages. For instance, the hashtag #cairo was used recently by people tweeting about events in Egypt. So when fashion brand Kenneth Cole used it in an apparent effort to promote its new collection, there was quite an uproar. The offending tweet was deleted and an apology soon followed – but given the furious reaction, perhaps the damage is done. Sending stupid automatic direct messages. One of my personal bugbears is people who’ve set Twitter up so that each of their new followers gets sent a pointless, impersonal direct message. It usually says something along the lines of: ‘thanks for following, don’t forget to check out my blog’. Whenever I receive one, I unfollow immediately. Direct messages are for important and personal stuff, not generic rubbish. Posting messages without asking permission. There’s a growing number of tools that ask for access to your social media accounts in order to do clever things. And some of them are really clever, like this Japanese interactive music video. If you’re thinking of building something similar, just make sure you don’t post messages to anyone’s account without explicitly asking permission. It’s really, really rude. Mixing up personal and business accounts. Malcolm Coles highlighted a classic example on his blog. It can happen with any social network, but posting a message to the wrong account is most likely with Twitter, because it’s not always obvious if you’re logged in as yourself or your business. Don’t mix the two – it can get really awkward. Broadcasting without stopping to listen. Social media is meant to be a two-way thing. You don’t just broadcast whatever it is you think people want to hear. It’s a conversation – so you need to listen to what people are saying about and to you too. Celebrities on Twitter are maybe most guilty of this. But plenty of businesses don’t bother to stop and listen either. What are the biggest social media mistakes you’ve seen companies make?
Is Facebook set to unify platforms?
As more and more applications are developed and consumers continue to be led by social media, could it be that instead of HTML5 driven websites, 2011 will become all about developing enhanced presences on Facebook for your business? It seems online retailer ASOS certainly have that thought in their mind. They have announced that they will launch a fully transactional Facebook shop, allowing people to buy from its entire range from within the social network. It is thought that the ASOS Facebook app will be one of the first, certainly from a big brand, that will allow people to buy directly from a brand without leaving Facebook. In the past Facebook apps have been used as a shop-front for sales, directing customers interested in products through to the brand’s main website to carry out transactions. This however, will lower clicks, improving conversion rates and also keep customers within the same social network environment. With changes in data usage and charges by mobile phone networks in the past year, the mobile shopping experience has probably not progressed as quickly as many may have expected. However, with many of those same networks including ‘free unlimited’ usage of applications like Facebook, transactions within a Facebook store like this could technically be free to customers, removing one of the biggest barriers to mobile ecommerce take-up. ASOS says it will have its entire stock – which is ever growing at the rate of 1,300 products each week – on the Facebook store. The app will also allow for ‘peer-review’ of products with like buttons and comments being enabled to assist customers in making their purchasing decisions. As a customer of ASOS from its very early beginnings I am for one am certainly looking forward to seeing how it works and if it will change the way people do ecommerce. Would you consider buying via a Facebook application? Would you consider using a Facebook application to sell your goods?
A Messaging Experience
That’s the detail of the newly unveiled “modern messaging system” from Facebook. But what does it all mean? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggests it is based on the way high school students communicate. According to their recent feedback to him they don’t like email “It’s too formal” Zuckerberg noted. Yet, Zuckerberg was also at pains to state “this is not an email killer” it was the “messaging experience” email included that he was unveiling, to make communication simpler. The key factors for communication of the future according to Zuckerberg: * seamless * informal * immediate * personal * simple * minimal * short So Facebook under this new project is to offer seamless messaging, conversation history, and a social inbox. The idea is it is cross-media: email, chat, SMS — all kept in a single social inbox. Plus all of your conversation history with people is kept in a central location. To my own eye that seems a logical move, the kind of way your brain would link information. You don’t store all your SMS chats in one part of your memory away from all the email chats, you store them according to conversations and who they were with. Conversations no longer end when you put down the telephone receiver. You might very well follow up with an SMS, or chat using an online messenger. It’s those often fragmented ‘gems’ that Facebook aims to collate and store for you to readily refer back to. It is all about encouraging 365/24/7 communication and as part of that Facebook is set to soon launch an updated iPhone app too. There will also be @facebook.com email addresses available too – although how and when these will be allocated are yet to be seen, the allocation procedure for Facebook pages has been complicated enough! You won’t need a Facebook email address to use the tool. you can use any address. The big issue with that and the whole concept however will be privacy. The word most often thrown at Facebook by its detractors, the impact on privacy of communication is unknown as yet but is sure to become a hot topic again as Facebook rolls out this new project over the next few months. Meanwhile, hot on the heels of Facebook attempting to change the way we chat, Apple has posted a cryptic message on its Web site, teasing the world about an “exciting” iTunes announcement that’s coming in the next 24 hours. If you’ve not yet seen the rumours, suggestions range from The Beatles back catalogue finally becoming available to iTunes, to the potentially MP3 killing streaming music service. We’ll hold off our comments on this one until the final announcement (3pm London Time today) as we’ve given up second guessing the Apple marketeers, but as Christmas draws near, the competition for brand awareness is certainly hotting up in the internet arena. What are your thoughts on Facebook’s messaging system?