7 Social Media Tips From Top Industry Experts

Tip #1: Host Live Facebook Events

To add great value and give your fans a different way of interacting with you, every now and then offer live chat sessions, teleseminars and webinars. Mari Smith and her friend Chris Treadaway conducted what they called a "flash chat" as a way of crowdsourcing content for a book.

They used the webinar platform Linqto which enabled people to interact with them as the presenters used a webcam to take turns being on the floor. Participant interaction took place via chat.

If you don't have that type of technical know how you can keep it simple by doing a simple Q&A session on the wall of your Facebook Page.

Tip #2: Be Willing to Help the Less Than Famous

The best way to build your personal brand is to involve other people in the process. Do your best to help others and give others credit for the awesome work they do. Though it may seem like a lot of work, in the long run it pays off. On top of that, as Erik Qualman says in his book Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business, "It's the right thing to do."

Easy ways to help other people include tweeting their work and leaving great comments on their blogs.

Don't just target your help toward top name people; they get a lot of love and attention. You'll really stand out if you help out those who have great potential but are not yet well known.

Tip #3: Don't Overemphasize Marketing

Remember, social media marketing is... social. Heading right into marketing without investing the proper amount of time in the social part of social media marketing is detrimental. There are certain expectations within social media, with one of the major expectations being community. "Very often these expectations do not include having marketing messages jammed down their throats," writes Hollis Thomases in Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day.

Tip #4: Find Out What Your Customers Want

Brian Solis, in Engage: The Complete Guide to Building, Cultivating and Measuring Success in the Social Web writes, "... my best advice to you is to go figure out what your opportunity is first." He suggests using the tool Research.ly to learn more about your prospects.

Tip #5: Meet People Offline

It's a natural tendency to go online for information and even for friendship and networking. While the Internet is a great place for these things, nothing replaces time spent face-to-face with other people.

Steve Garfield, writes in Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business about the importance of mingling with others in a setting where everyone is welcome.

Tip #6: Share the Knowledge of Experts With Your Readers

Find the experts in your industry and the offer to interview them about their newest product. Ask them a lot of questions that you know your audience will want to know the answers to. According to Michael Stelzner, the founder of Social Media Examiner, this is a great way to not only build a solid relationship with the expert, but to also provide content of tremendous value to your audience.

Tip #7: Be Controversial

Dean Hunt writes, "... here's a strategy I created to ensure that your content WILL get noticed....In fact, people will do a double-take when they see your content title and will not be able to resist reading it. I call it the 'negative slant.' It's very simple to do and works best with informational or how-to content."

As an example he gives the title of a blog post he recently wrote, "How to Work Really Hard and Make No Money." The negative spin on the title created shock value and contributed to it being a great success.


BONUS TIP:

When it comes to Facebook, you need a tailored strategy that works for your business. As time goes by, Facebook proves to be more important. You're starting to see a widening gap of those who get it and those who don't.

If you are looking to increase your leads, drive more traffic to your website and turn fans and followers into customers, FBinfluence is your step-by-step solution for making Facebook Marketing work for your business.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6504933

5 Social Media Don't's You Should Avoid

Social media marketing can be an excellent way to connect with your current and potential customers. When used correctly, it can increase brand awareness, create brand loyalty and help get you get the attention of new potential customers. However, when used the wrong way, it can end up annoying customers and driving them away. Here's how to avoid the 5 social media marketing "don'ts" so this doesn't happen to you.

1. Don't post the exact same message to all of your social media outlets. Some brands post the exact same information on their Facebook pages as they do on their Twitter accounts. If you do this, it means that customers who are following you on both networks are getting duplicate information. This shows your customers that you don't really care about putting an effort into engaging your social media followers. This will defeat the purpose of even posting on those networks at all and you will be in danger of losing your following.

2. Don't ignore the negative feedback you receive. It's inevitable that once in a while you'll get a bad comment on Facebook or someone on Twitter tweeting something rude. It's no secret that disgruntled customers often turn to social media to express their anger. However, to just delete these comments and act like they never happened is the wrong approach. It's important to follow up with the customer to resolve the issue. No one wants bad word-of-mouth advertising. Social media gives you a chance to see what people are saying about you and change their opinion of you. If a customer is upset because they came to your restaurant and received what they thought was "bad service," then invite them to come back free of charge. Whether you decide to publicly address the issue (so others can see how you handle it) or call the individual privately to resolve the conflict is your choice.

3. Don't use your social media network only as a sales tool. One of the biggest social media marketing no-no's is using your networks only to send a bunch of sales messages daily. Social media networks are a place to connect with and engage your customers, not bore them with generic sales messages. It's okay to announce a promotion or even a service you provide once in a while, but make sure your more "sales-y" messages are scarce when compared to your interesting and engaging content that customers will enjoy.

4. Don't constantly beg your existing fans to help you get more. Social media marketing isn't about who has the most followers, it's about who has the most engaged followers. If all you do is constantly ask your existing fans to help you get more, without providing any incentive or reward, they'll get bored and unfollow you. They'll also wonder why the great participation they're giving you isn't enough. Don't make your fans feel underappreciated; that's a big social media marketing faux pas.

5. Don't offer a promotion for "new customers only." We've all seen this marketing no-no. Although it's great that you're using social media to announce a promotion, it's bad that you're discluding some of your followers. Many brands offer a promotion only to new customers hoping to rope in some new clients. However, what about your existing clients? What do they get for being loyal to your brand? If they're following you on Facebook or Twitter, they're already a step ahead of your other customers. This means you should be giving them extra perks, not making them feel left out of a special discount. Remember to offer specials and inside information to your social network followers as a whole, because they are already a segmented group of your entire customer base.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6654140

Should Facebook Tell Users Who Has Seen Their Posts?

Last week, an article by Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel started an interesting debate. The question: should Facebook show users how many of their friends see their posts, as well as how many likes and comments these posts get?

Motivated by a Stanford University study entitled “Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks”, which revealed that Facebook users were “reaching 35% of their friends with each post and 61% of their friends over the course of a month”, Warzel opined that it might be beneficial to users if they had access to their posts’ reach stats, just as page manager’s and advertisers do.

He also theorised why Facebook didn’t reveal these stats, based on two passages from the Stanford University study which speculated as to why the 220,000 users involved in the study thought that a lower percentage of their friends were seeing their posts that the actual 61%.

The first passage:

Why do people underestimate their audience size in social media? One possible explanation is that, in order to reduce cognitive dissonance, users may lower their estimates for posts that receive few likes or comments. A necessary consequence of users underestimating their audience is that they must be overestimating the probability that each audience member will choose to like or comment on the post. For these posts without feedback, it might be more comfortable to believe that nobody saw it than to believe that many saw it but nobody liked it.

The second passage:

Some measure of social translucence and plausible deniability seems helpful: audience members might not want to admit they saw each piece of content, and sharers might be disappointed to know that many people saw the post but nobody commented or “Liked”.Warzel reasoned that it is probably in Facebook’s interest to keep reach stats from users, so that they aren’t disappointed by the fact that their friends will often see their posts but won’t engage with them, which might in turn cause them to post on Facebook less.

In the article, however, Warzel did not definitively say whether Facebook should make reach stats available to users or not, instead concluding that Facebook kept the vast majority of statistics hidden from the average user – a fact that Warzel didn’t say outright was a bad thing, but did imply as such with the overall tone of his article.
Thirteen hours ago, Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom posted a response to Warzel’s article on Facebook. He wrote that the main premise of Warzel’s opinion piece – “that everyone wants to know how many friends see each of their posts and Facebook doesn't want to tell them” – is incorrect, revealing that, in fact, Facebook had built and tested a similar feature internally but concluded that there wasn’t any real demand for it:

[People] are way more interested in seeing *who* liked their posts, rather than just the number of people who saw it. In fact, in all of the thousands of pieces of feedback we receive about News Feed each month, virtually no one has asked to see this information.

Backstrom took umbrage at Warzel’s implication that Facebook’s engineers “have lots of ulterior motives when [they] make decisions about News Feed”. In the case of users seeing reach stats, for example, Backstrom said the time it took to implement the feature “isn't worth the space it would take up on the screen”.

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine drew Warzel’s attention to Backstrom’s rebuttal, asking for his opinion viaTwitter. On Twitter, Warzel clarified his position on the main question “should Facebook tell users who has seen their posts?” He argued that users should be able to see how many people have viewed their posts, but not who these people are.




Warzel went on to say that he thinks it strange that Facebook encourages users to connect, but then doesn’t reveal how much users are actually connecting through posts and comments, saying that he finds it “hard to believe [that] those looking to 'share' with 'friends' don't care at all about actually reaching them” asking “why do it then?” A question Constine answered, saying that posting adds “another competitive element” to Facebook and people are actually sharing “for themselves”.

Constine then wrote an article about the conversation himself, determining that Backstrom is probably telling the truth:

[The] missing view counts stems not from some malicious fight to keep users in the dark, but from Facebook’s philosophy of trying to only build things that are useful for a wide audience.

Personally, I agree with Constine and Backstrom, I don’t think that the average user really wants or needs to see their posts’ reach stats. It would benefit me more, in fact, if the engagement stat became available, as I post videos and articles more often than statuses. It would be interesting to see how many people engaged with my embedded content, even if they didn't like or share it themselves, just to see what sort of things my friends were interested in.

In reality, though, I would prefer things to stay as they are, with just likes and comments, as they’re the only two positive options I have ever really needed (I say positive because a ‘disapprove’ button would also come in useful, but would never become a reality).

Do you think Facebook users should be able to see the reach of their posts?