Social Media Broadcasting

Building your Tribe & Establishing your expertise.

Accurately describing a social network on paper is at best difficult. Many different sites, reports and tools work together with the online consumer ecosystem to create a flow of information from your business out into the social universe. Once the message is consistently present, listeners find it and "tune in."

The best example I can use is that of a radio station broadcast. Online content and social media tools create the information "broadcast." Those looking for information on your brand, product, or area of expertise find you in the social stream through search engines, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. If you demonstrate expertise through useful content, and are consistently present, your tribe "tunes in" to your social media channels.

If you are a business, stepping into this new medium can be confusing. Here are the five key steps required to successfully design and execute a social media marketing strategy.

• Publishing: Everything starts with content. Written and hosted on primarily on your website, blog, or YouTube channel, the content is the key element of your company websites. New content attracts search engines, website visitors, and those who want to know more about your brand, or area of expertise.
• Broadcasting: Broadcasting tools allow you to take content and spread it across the social media universe. The right broadcasting tools also allow you to link to content created by others, and add their content to your broadcast. Using our metaphor, a radio station doesn't products all their own programming. By hosting other experts, their own reputation grows, and so does yours. After we've created content, our next step is to gain followers.
• Listening: You must listen to your customers and to your own broadcast. How far does your reach extend? Are you getting feedback? Are others connecting with you? You can listen through specific web-based tools feedback tools, evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign, and adjust your strategy whenever necessary. You status as an expert is earned, and the information you've provide is the currency.
• Marketing: After you generate a listening audience, the friends and followers are converted into buyers, which happens the old-fashioned way. Prospects become customers when you give them a reason to purchase now, and make sure that the value they receive is greater than the money coming out of their wallet. After you establishing yourself as an expert, the next step is offering incentives and perks to purchase now.
• Connecting: Pushing information outbound is the first step in social marketing. This process creates what I referred to as Inbound Marketing. Now your prospects are contacting you. Facebook, Twitter, your blog, email, etc are the telephone of the 21st century business, and businesses don't stay in business long if they don't answer their telephones.

In the next five posts, I will discuss each step in more detail. If you're not using social media, your business is already at a disadvantage. You can find "How To" tutorials about specific tools across the web. This series will help you grasp "Why" social media is the key to connecting with your businesses next generation of customers, clients and stakeholders.

If your business is ready to take the plunge into the social media pool, contact timothy@startrankingnow.com, or visit our website at www.startrankingnow.com. Our global team of experts will improve your online visibility, and help you create your online social media broadcast.

Read more ►

Top Five Twitter Tips To Help Get Noticed!

Unless you are living under a rock, chances are you have heard of Twitter. Once mainly used by celebs to post quick updates of their daily activities, Twitter has quickly risen to the tops of marketing strategies world-wide, and for good reason. Twitter is an extremely fast way to get your information out there in small doses, share valuable information with your network, and most importantly, reach customers which you may never have been able to reach before.

While Twitter is a simply way to get your message out there, Twitter marketing is not an instant success without putting some effort into it. Successful advertising on Twitter takes some time and thought, and cultivating a strong following is the easiest way for you to reach this success. Below, we have listed the Top Five Twitter Tips one should take in order to build the following which will get you noticed.

• Keep Your Tweets Short (Even shorter than the 140 word limit): This is a very important tip, one which is usually overlooked. Many people get in the mindset that they need to use all 140 characters for their Tweets, when this is not the case at all. Ideally, you will want to keep your tweets hovering right around the 100 character limit. Why is this? When you are sharing valuable content with your followers, you ideally will want your followers to re tweet your posts. By keeping your posts right at around 100 characters, you will give your followers a chance to not only RT your post, but also add their own information into the tweet (Such as Great information from an expert in the field!)
• Go with Quality over Quantity: The Twitter-verse is a wide open area filled with (literally) millions of users. While it is very tempting to start following every single person you come in contact with, using that strategy may not be the best for your business. The goal with Twitter is to be able to connect with potential customers, other experts in your specialty field, trade organizations, and any other entity which can help expand your business. Following random individuals will likely not get you to the point you need to be.
• Create relationships with your audience: One of the biggest mistakes you can make on Twitter is Tweeting irrelevant content. While it's great to share personal tidbits of your life every now and then (example: Having such a great time on vacation!), you will want to post articles, links, Blogs, and comments which will engage your readers. The more you engage your audience with relevant information, they will begin to look to you for sources of new content and begin to RT your posts more often.
• Make use of hash tags: #Hashtags are a great way to get a conversation going regarding your brand or any special events you may be having. The great thing about Hashtags is that it groups together tweets from everyone talking about your specific hash tag, which helps open up your organization to a much wider audience.
• Consider outsourcing your Tweets to a professional: Getting yourself out there in the world of social media can be a bit daunting in the event you don’t really know what you're doing. There are a great number of SEO companies available for hire, such as Austin TX SEO companies. An Austin internet marketing company will take control of all your social media accounts and are completely skilled in tweeting, Facebook updating, G+ maintenance, and all aspects of your internet marketing campaign.

Read more ►

Twitter Finds New Purpose

Twitter has all of the makings of a social networking phenomenon. It is easy to use and does not require users to fill out extensive profiles. The pressure to compete by uploading pictures and appearing to maintain active real-life social lives that is present on other social networking sites does not exist on Twitter. Celebrities have taken to Twitter en masse because it allows them to interact with their fans while maintaining control of their privacy. Unfortunately, for all of Twitter's convenience, it has yet to establish a true purpose.

Ever since Facebook enabled users to compose status updates, Twitter has been in flux. Twitter still limits its users to one hundred and forty characters per tweet, while Facebook does not impose such limits on status updates. Facebook has a more aesthetically appealing interface that makes room for lots of pictures. Twitter can be difficult to navigate. A user who has responded to a lot of other people's tweets will have a profile page that is clogged with incongruous statements, since the tweet to which he is responding does not appear on the page in question. This makes people's Twitter pages utterly uninteresting to other people. Twitter users have no reason to navigate away from their own home pages. Using Twitter becomes a bizarre exercise in solipsism; people post their own updates and do not stick around to read what other people have to say.

This is a shame, since Twitter really is a great concept, especially when one considers smart phone usage. Twitter can easily be updated via a cell phone, and other people's tweets can be seen more easily on a phone than their Facebook updates can. Facebook's multiple functions make viewing and using it from a phone a very unwieldy process. Even so, since all of those functions make people feel more connected to each other, Facebook remains the favored social network.

Twitter has only recently branched out into the realm of advertising. In the past, businesses have set up user accounts and waited for customers to find and follow them. Announcing contests and giveaways via surprise tweets is an effective way of keeping customers excited about a brand and encouraging them to check out the company's profile page regularly. This practice allowed businesses to skirt having to pay Twitter for advertising privileges, although the downside was that establishing a company page in that manner only attracted people who were already customers. There was no embedded mechanism within Twitter that would have made it possible for companies to make themselves known to potential new clients.

Within the past few months, Twitter has begun sneaking sponsored tweets into users' news feeds. This is a very clever way to advertise. Modern consumers are savvy to banner ads, and they know not to open anything sent by an email marketing reseller; they have learned how to completely avoid absorbing any of the information contained in these kinds of advertisements. A sponsored tweet, on the other hand, looks just like a tweet from a friend, which means that users will consciously read them before realizing it was an ad. Time will tell if Twitter users resent being tricked into reading advertisements, but for the time being it appears to be working. TV networks in particular have successfully promoted event programming using sponsored tweets.

Twitter may have found its niche as a hub of advertising. Just as celebrity users boosted Twitter's profile, so might its newfound business acumen. Its challenge will be to remain interesting to users who may not want to see tweets from brands that are irrelevant to their interests.

My name is Nisha Sharma. I represent a site called neteffekt.com. I love to write, especially about travel, finance and offer business advice.

Read more ►