Posts Tagged ‘followers’

The simplicity of Twitter is what helped make it one of the most popular and powerful online social media sites today. If used well, Twitter can be an effective and invaluable marketing tool that will let you reach a vast audience of potential customers and clients. The 140-character limit imposed on tweets forces your messages to be concise, and in this media-saturated culture, that is exactly the type of easily digestible format that people crave. Here are 5 tips for taking advantage of Twitter in your marketing strategies.

1. Enhance the reach of your business blog
The more popular your company’s blog becomes, the higher its standing will be in search engine results, and thus the more exposure your brand name will get to potential customers. Twitter provides a great way of increasing your blog’s reach. Use twitter feed to give your followers immediate access to your main blog page.

2.  Engage your audience in conversation
Engaging members of your target audience in conversation is one the key pillars of a good marketing campaign. It’s not enough just to shout your slogan at them. You have to see what they have to say so that you can deliver your message in more effective and unique ways. To see what other people are saying and to respond to their tweets, use TweetGrid and TweetDeck. Look for relevant topics and add your two cents to the conversation.

3. Valuable, concise tweets
The 140-character limit that’s at the center of Twitter’s success forces you to really think carefully about your tweets. The trick to gaining a good following is to put out immediately valuable messages that are concise and compelling. This is what will get you new followers and retweets.

4. Keep up on your market’s trends
One of the key elements of good marketing is to know what’s going on in your industry. Twitter Search and Monitter makes it easy to look up important industry topics and see what the market is currently leaning towards.

5. Build interest groups
By creating compelling interests groups you can initiate discussion about specific industry topics that are relevant to your marketing campaign. Building interest groups on Twitter is easy and is a great way to generate followers and buzz.

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Guest Post by: Ryan Frank  a 23 year writer and blogger living in San Diego, CA.  Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/social-marketing-articles/5-marketing-tips-for-twitter-1283390.html

Everyone knows that niche marketing is the way to go these days.  I’ve blogged about what niche marketing is before on this site. 

Niches allow you to focus your efforts for maximum effect – you’re not wasting time trying to cover a huge area – rather, you’re spending your resources pinpointing a target market.  The best way to build a niche following (of targeted potential customers) is by building a blog.

People love blogs.  Blogs are great places to find an ongoing flow of information that is relevant to a certain topic or subject area.  Some people think blogs are only for the internet marketing niche or personal blogs for people wanting to talk about their holidays.  Not so – they work brilliantly with all niche markets. 

All you have to do is choose your niche and start your blog.

Yes, I’m being a bit over simplistic by saying that – but really, blogs aren’t difficult to create and maintain and a blog is a great way to publish your content – the content that marks you as an expert in your field.

To build a niche following with a blog, you’ll want to first choose your niche keywords carefully.  Once you’ve done that, you can create content – your blog posts, even podcasts and videos that you embed in your blog, that center on those keywords.

Keep your blog fresh and updated on a very regular basis, and make sure you’ve search engine optimized your blog.  You’ll find that the search engines are more than happy to give it a good page rank.  This leads to more traffic and more traffic leads to a growing following.  

Create a blog to support your niche.  You’ll brand yourself as an expert quickly and it is just one more way for people to find you.  And with lots of good quality content presented in one place, they will keep coming back.  It’s true it can take a lot of effort – but it will reap rewards for you!

Article Marketing is a term which you hear a lot about on the internet.  But if you’ve never done any article marketing, you may be wondering what the buzz is about.  It’s simple.  Article Marketing is a very valuable way of increasing your exposure online – but in more ways than you might think.

So let’s look at how article marketing can benefit your online business building.

•      Article Marketing builds one way links to your website.

Firstly to get a significant presence online and those all important top spots on Google, you need one way back links from quality sites. 

Every article you write should include a link to your website, contained within the final part of the article, called the resource box.  This is the part of the article where it’s acceptable to “sell yourself” by talking about your business and giving a back link to your website.  Assuming your article is interesting enough and you have written the resource box correctly, you will get interested “click through” traffic to your website.  And this will be interested traffic which the “gurus” call “pre-sold” ie people who are interested in knowing more about what your have to say.

And, as article directories are considered to be authority sites on the internet, search engines are thought to give higher weighting to inbound links from articles.  This improves your ranking in the search engines and ultimately will increase traffic to your website. 

•      Article Marketing does your advertising for free.

Everyone needs traffic to their website.  In fact lack of traffic is the number one problem newbies have online.  But how do you get it?  How can you get your name and your business “out there” to let people know you are online? 

If you had a “bricks and mortar” business, you would advertise and online is no different.  But advertising can be expensive – very expensive.  And at the best even top advertising agencies reckon that only 50% works (“trick is, knowing which 50%!).

Article marketing, however, is free.  And reaps long term rewards.  Article Marketing increases long term targeted traffic by creating widespread exposure across the internet. 

On the downside it can take time for the traffic to start reaching your website.  But when it comes, assuming you wrote the article on the same subject as your website, the traffic is completely targeted to your offer, so people are more likely to buy. 

•      Article Marketing establishes you as an expert.

It’s a known fact of human psychology.  People always go with the market leader, the biggest brand name or the most famous person.  It makes them feel “safe”.  Think about it.  When faced with the “real deal” or a “copy-cat”, which do you choose?  It’s the same online. 

Whenever someone wants the info-product or online service which you offer, they are likely start with a search engine search, such as Google.  If they find you, they might also want to know more about you and search for your name on Google too.  If they can’t find you, they may assume you are some sort of “fly-by-night” and move onto the next guy. 

But if you’ve been doing any amount of Article Marketing, they will find your name and be able to get a good idea of who you are and what you offer.  This builds their confidence in you, increasing their likelihood of following through with a sale!

So there you are; three sensational reasons why you should do Article Marketing.  And if you want a great Article Submission Service, please check out my review at http://www.susanowenthursfield.com/reviews/article_marketer 

Everyone is talking about Twitter.

Some of us are using Twitter.

Does anyone know why?

OK I admit it – I signed up for Twitter and didn’t really know why…. but I am slowly beginning to see the value of it.

Facebook and MySpace have experienced massive growth over the last few years and are widely known as effective “friend management” tools.  To be frank, email has become a pain for a lot of personal and commercial users.  The amount of spam received means that you can spend valuable time every day just sorting through and deleting emails that are trying to sell you watches, pills and poker.

If you elect to invest in an elaborate spam filter then the chances are you still continue to receive some spam.  It’s a bit like getting a flu jab – you still get flu but your arm doesn’t.

On the other side of the coin the filter is “so good” you don’t get legitimate email that was intended for you.  I have personally received email from the person sitting in the office down the corridor marked as SPAM.

Facebook and MySpace eliminate this communication nightmare.  The concept is simple.  I invite you as a friend.  You say yes.  You get my messages.  If we decide we don’t want to be friends we don’t get each other’s messages.

Facebook has presented great advertising opportunities.  Facebook knows your age and habits (well some of them, so don’t panic) so it knows what sort of adverts to throw up on the page you are looking at.  This can be tedious.

Facebook is viewed by some as a little too revealing.  I have people who have asked me to be friends on Facebook who blank me when I see them in the veg aisle in the Co-Op.  If I let you be my friend you can, at your leisure, see every picture that I have posted of me on holiday, at a party, wedding reception – anywhere.  I find this all a bit too much and a little disturbing.  If I came home and found someone in my living room that I vaguely knew who had spread out all of my photo albums on the floor and was poring over them I don’t think I would find it acceptable if they said “…but I thought we were friends.”

Twitter is a de-cluttered version of Facebook and MySpace without all the intrusive bits.  The messages on Twitter or “tweets” are very short (140 characters including spaces) as they are designed to be received as SMS text messages.

You can follow someone on Twitter or be a follower.  If you want to follow celebrities then it’s easy to follow someone like Jimmy Carr and receive all their tweets.  However, this does have commercial applications also.  Using Twitter I can keep clients who choose to follow me up to date with changes in the marketplace.

I see my Twitter followers as my own mini “swarm” that I intend to grow.  My followers will belong to other swarms and so these swarms will be exposed to my Tweets.  This means I can potentially reach a huge marketplace of people who I have never rubbed shoulders with.

This article was written by David Clarke, an internet marketing consultant and a partner at DBS who offer UK 0845 numbers and web design in Lincoln and related telecommunication / internet services.  Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/social-marketing-articles/twitter-an-introduction-in-laymans-terms-894038.html

It’s a Blog New World.  Social media has changed how we communicate. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger.com and dozens of other social media sites have given us a new way to communicate with friends and business colleagues.  They have also given us a new vocabulary.  We now “blog” and “tweet” and “text”.  We read “blooks” and “microblogs” and are concerned about “trackbacks.”

But most importantly, social media has given us a new set of communication rules.  And if you are a business leader, knowing the ins and outs of social media communication can be critical to your online reputation and your business presence.  

Here are eight guidelines executives might think about when communicating in this brave new social media world.

1.  Think Eternity. When writing a blog, tweeting, or commenting on any social site, the first thought in your head should be, “These words are permanent.”  Will you be proud to see the comments you wrote, let’s say twenty years from now?  Comments associated with your name can advance or tarnish your online reputation, so write with an eye to your future.

2.  Think Like Aretha Franklin.  Remember her famous song, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”?   No matter what social media you engage with, offering up respectful comments, recognizing and calling-out the efforts of others, and keeping a collaborative mindset will serve you well.  It’s also one of the most important brand traits for a business leader.

3.  Think Like Twitter.  Few people have the time or inclination to read rambling and lengthy articles or comments.  Twitter’s micro blogging 140-character limit forces us to be crisp and focused.  No matter what the venue, concise and to-the-point writing will help gain any business leader an audience.

4.  Think Like the Audience.  What do THEY want to read?  What are THEIR likes and needs?  Make your comments and writing more about your readers than about you.  That’s not to say you should keep your opinion in check, just make your opinion relevant and topical for readers.

5.  Think Story.  People all over the world love narratives.  You can never underestimate the power of a good story, no matter how long or short it is.  When commenting and especially when blogging, add stories, relevant business examples, and real-life people to make your writing come alive.

6.  Think With Your Ears.  Listen to the crowd.  Don’t just jump in and write to LinkedIn colleagues or respond to a blog post.  Really listen to the collective voice first.  Maybe read a post more than once before you respond, or review a few of the blogger’s key words.  By really listening, you’ll know how to more effectively frame your comments—you’ll add more value and be more a part of the social fabric.

7.  Think of the Venue.  Each social site has its own conventions and ways of doing things.  Spend some time checking-out the lay of the land before you land your comments on a page.  Conventions for Twitter are vastly different from those for Facebook or your corporate blog.  Think, “Editorial Guidelines” so your comments will be in keeping with the look, feel and flow of the social site you’re writing for.

8.  Think Twice Before You Tweet.  Does the world really care that you are going off to the slopes now, or meeting Mr. X for lunch, or taste-testing a new microbrew?  As a business leader, are you advancing compelling business ideas?  The types of comments that might be relevant to your favs or family might NOT be relevant to the corporate world.  If it’s not of value to the collective business crowd, think twice before posting.

Bottom-line, the social media is not like the American Wild West.  There are rules, conventions, etiquette and best practices.  And as a business leader, following or not following those guidelines can impact your executive brand.

Thinking about social media conventions before you jump in can make the experience a better one for both you and your readers.

Guest Post by : Loraine Antrim, co-founding partner of Core Ideas Communication, a PR and marketing communications firm serving corporate clients around the globe. We specialize in strategy, message & content development, media/analyst training and leadership development. Find us on the web at www.coreideas.com.  Loraine’s blog on executive presence can be found at: http://thecxomindset.blogspot.com/  Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/social-marketing-articles/social-media-best-practices-for-executives-890082.html

Twitter is widely regarded as “the next big thing” in social marketing “Must Dos” and everyone is saying that the way forward is to have a huge following on Twitter… 

Well here’s a site that shows you a way of getting thousands of new followers on twitter, virally.

Check it out http://tinyurl.com/ald76r

It’s a simple concept, you retweet a message and start following the 6 people in front of you in the system.

A message posted on your twitter will automatically be formated with your unique link so that people following will follow you in position 1 to use the system themselves.  Their new followers will also follow you in position 2 and so on for five levels deep. 

Importantly for me, it’s totally “white hat”, 100% free and simple to set up.  All of this means that it’s likely to be followed up by a lot of people – and increase your following by hundreds if not thousands of people you would never had had the opportunity to meet.  Even the die-hard skeptics will realise that at least some of these will be responsive to your tweets.

This is brand new, so you’ll benefit if you are an early adopter.  I just started using it, so I expect to see a hike in my “follower” stats anytime soon!  Why not see if it’s for you?