Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged twitter
Finding Your Customers On Social Networks
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
For most organizations, the conversation of “why” or “should” we do social media has shifted to “where” and “how” do we do social media?
A major component of answering those questions effectively is understanding in which social platforms your customers are already connected and concentrated, because there really is no benefit in beating your customers or clients to the punch this time! Companies need to follow…not lead, their customers across the social networking web.
Maybe your boss thinks none of your customers are on Facebook, but you think they are. How can you prove it?
Or maybe you’re a small-business owner, and know many of your clients or customers are socially connected, but aren’t sure how to find them?
Here are 4 ways to find out where your customers are in social media:
#1: Hire Someone to Tell You
Rapleaf and Flowtown are just two services that reside in the emerging field called “social anthropology”. You provide them with the list of all your customer email addresseses, and they figure out who among your customers is on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media networks; their likes, and other important details.
#2: Analyze Email Behavior
Have you added links to all your social accounts in your emails? Have you added the ability for your email recipients to share content on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and elsewhere? If you send email routinely, you need to add these functions to your email immediately.
Most quality email service providers give you the option of easily adding sharing tools, and you can then run a report showing which of your subscribers clicked your Twitter link and/or shared content on Facebook.
Viola! Now you know that person is a member and is active on those social sites.
#3: Just Ask!
One of the most obvious ways of finding out where your customers are hanging out and using social media is also the simplest, but unfortunately the least utilized. Just ask them.
If you have a “Contact Us” form, an online lead generation form, an email newsletter signup or a shopping cart, why are you still only asking for name, address and email address?
Add data collection fields for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, at minimum.
#4: Your Friends at Hat Trick Associates
If you have email addresses for your customers, we here at HTA can actual use a little trick that takes advantage of the system functionality of one of the top email providers.
Without giving away the whole secret, let us tell you that with just your email list, we can tell you within the hour every single one of them who are on both Facebook and Twitter!
If you’d like to learn more, or just how we do it, all you need to do is Contact Us!
So How Many Blogs Are There, Anyway?
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
I’ve been searching recently to answer a question that many who are considering new online programs have asked: Just how many blogs are there, anyway?
Let us start by saying that hard, reliable data is difficult to find! Many of the services or engines that track individual blogs, especially Google, don’t share their information. Even for those that do share data, it’s still impossible to know if their lists are all-inclusive, or how many “dead” and zombie, or “sleeping” blogs they contain.
“Dead” means just what you probably think it means – the blog has been permanently abandoned or discontinued. Unfortunately, this is the fate of many blogs.
Zombie or “sleeping” blogs are terms I just made up, because they seem to fit so nicely – blogs that are temporarily dormant, but will be revived by their owners at some point in the future.
So, you want a number, right?
Well, the current estimates say there are about 450 million “active” English language blogs right now, but that number varies according to the source. Technorati estimated over 200 million blogs at the start of 2009, with exponential growth since then.
Of course these numbers change every day however, as new blogs are started by the thousands (or tens of thousands) every day, and a large number of blogs have also reached the point of where they could be defined as “abandoned” and should be subtracted. When including non-English in the total number, especially those in Chinese Mandarin, and there may be over one billion blogs worldwide.
This equates to 1 out of every 6 people in the world with a personal blog!
This is often because many business blogs, those written by small business owners or others who are responsible for specific company blogs discover that finding topics to write about, finding the time to actually write the posts, upload them, and adhering to an established publishing schedule is a lot harder than it seems at first.
This is often the point where blog copywriters or other marketing freelancers are asked to step in and help with writing services, at least by those companies who (wisely!) wish to continue with the benefits that are being generated by their blog. The fact is that blogs – especially those that have been around for a while – can generate significant SEO value and traffic to businesses and their websites…and allowing them to become “abandoned” in the eyes of Google or other search engines (and therefore no longer relevant in rankings) is quite a shame!
(If you find yourself in this situation, take just a moment and visit our blog management page to see how we can help keep your blog active, so it continues to generate the valuable traffic to your website.)
How many people read or follow all these blogs?
This question is just as difficult to answer, because once again there is no reliable tracking mechanism. But certainly we are talking about many hundreds of millions of people, maybe 500 or 600 million total . If you include non-English blogs again, we can easily assume a number well above a billion people (remember, there might be a billion bloggers!) perhaps even more than 2 billion – or about 1 out of every 3 human beings on the planet.
With such a massive number of worldwide readers, it should go without saying that an active blog can be absolutely VITAL to establishing a strong web presence for your company or brands.
Blogging also allows you to regularly share “fresh” content, the kind that has become key to solid search engine rankings from Google, Bing and other search engines…whose web crawlers are constantly seeking out and indexing new content.
Your blog is also a great source of fodder to utilize in social media like company Facebook, Twitter and other networks.
In fact, it can be hard to conduct a social media campaign without a blog, with the other alternative being the addition of new stand-alone pages to your website.
Why is this? Facebook updates you are limited to 440 characters; Twitter only allows 140. There simply aren’t enough characters to communicate many marketing messages, detailed special events, sales promotions or educational content. This type of long form information is best shared via your blog (or through another page on your site, as noted), and then shared through your various social media platforms.
With so many blogs already, you might ask “should I even bother with my own?”
Your answer should be… Yes!
Sure every niche has a few very popular A-List bloggers. Guy Kawasaki comes to mind right away in the field of communication technology. John Mauldin is another, this time in the financial analysis and investment category. And Chad Ochocinco is one of the many popular athletes that are on Twitter and Facebook as well as blogging regularly. There are many (many!) others in every field or industry you can name.
But because of the low barriers to entry, almost anyone can begin blogging. And even those who don’t have the time and resources to blog themselves can still hire firms like ours to help them develop their own ideas and voice.
And as noted, some of the blogs that exist today won’t exist tomorrow.
So if you stick to your blogging plan, eventually you will gain on your competitors just through perseverance!
This means there are many voices, and while certainly not everyone will achieve A-List status, each one can attract its own share of attention, and contribute to the ongoing conversation which is the web today.
.
Need Help With Your Next Writing Project?
Contact me directly at: jhaynes@hattrickassociates.com, call (314) 494-3494
or visit our Contact page and fill out the brief form.
Jim
Prediction for 2010…
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
The start of a new year is the time for predictions, so I thought I would venture one of my own for 2010. The topic is a change I think will happen with online networking users, and although this refers to personal use, businesses will probably be affected as well.
A good analogy I’ve heard is that social networking brings far away people closer to you, at the expense of making those close to you further away. This makes sense, because we all have our limit of desired social interactions in a day (or week or month), and time spent talking with the college buddy who lives in Boston is time not spent talking to your much better friend who lives across town.
And after the initial rush of catching up with the high school friend who you haven’t seen in 17 years wears off, you suddenly realize that you really don’t care that they “Took the kids for ice cream this afternoon” or “Chose tiles for the big bathroom remodel project today.”
That’s not meant as a knock on old friends!
But everyone has limited time, and we are asked to do more and more with our finite resources these days.
For an example, I’m fairly new to Facebook. And as a newbie, I accepted every single invite that came my way, no matter how out of the blue it seemed…and surely thought that I’d never use the “Hide” button. For those unfamiliar, this button skips over posts made by that specific individual. It’s a little less permanent that Unfriending someone. (Don’t know that term? It was the Word of the Year in 2009). And I never thought I would use it. But now I have, at least sparingly so far.
Twitter has the same problem. You only see the last 25 tweets or so from the people you have subscribed to. But sign up for 200 or 300 accounts, just because they looked interesting at the time, and you will hardly ever see the messages that you really care about amidst the tsunami of messages from everyone else.
My prediction? Social networks will shrink, not grow, in 2010. I don’t mean that there won’t be new users who join these networks. There are still lots of people who are participating now, and some of them will finally give in this year. But the number of people you follow, or friend, or connect with will shrink to a more manageable number. (One exception may be LinkedIn. Primarily a business tool, maximizing your number of contacts will still be advantageous)
People will probably become more and more selective in who they allow into their network, to keep from being overwhelmed with information.
And note that this really doesn’t apply to celebrities, who use social networks primarily as one-way communication.
Or, that one person we all knew who had 11,423 “friends” on MySpace.