The popularity of social media seems to have come out of nowhere for most business owners. This leaves many scratching their heads wondering how exactly they’re supposed to utilize sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Mashable gives us 5 great tips for a successful social media content strategy:
“1. Know Your Voice
Everything you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand. It’s something Skittles does well. Some of its status messages garner more than 1,000 comments, and many exceed 10,000 “Likes” on Facebook.
Why are these little content snippets so successful? The writing is just like the candy: colorful, playful and imaginative. The pithy, daily, flavor-packed observations are reliably surprising. You can relish today’s post and look forward to tomorrow’s — like candy in word form.
2. Time Your Content
Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to say and when you’re going to say. Make sure it’s relevant to where people are in their lives and the season. Nobody cares about Santa Claus in January, but a whole lot of people care about sales after Christmas. A quick look at Google Trends will confirm that.
Banana Republic’s tweeters got the memo.
Macy’s and Walmart didn’t.
3. Know Your Audience
Why does somebody follow you? Why do they like you? It’s because your brand offers them something. Make sure you deliver. Here’s SKYY Vodka on Twitter with a message that’s relevant to most of its…” [Read more]
What is your social media content strategy? Leave a comment below!
Any tools that can help us spot trends is very welcome. If you spot trends early enough you can position yourself in a market before there is too much competition.
“With hundreds of thousands of websites integrating with Facebook Likes and 250 million people engaging with Likes just a little after a year after the Like button made its first appearance at F8, the space of Facebook Likes aggregation is about to get competitive. Facebook search engine Booshaka just released their own Facebook Likes categorization yesterday, for example. Likester just overhauled its platform, wanting to become the go-to Facebook Likes aggregator.
What Likester does differently from Booshaka is that it shows users realtime and popular Like trends, including what your friends are Liking, what everyone is Liking, what’s trending and a chronological log of all your friends Likes. A maps feature adds locality to what Likes are popular where.
As an example of the potential of this service, Likester is currently trying to predict the winner of American Idol by tracking how many people Like certain contestants during the show.
The best part about Likester is the drill down effects of item affinity when you hit the Details button on a specific Like. You can look into “Likesters who liked this also like” recommendations as well as suggest the content to friends and post it on your Facebook wall. Founder Kevin McCarthy says he is also experimenting with anti affinity, or figuring out what people…” [Read more]
I’ve been doing some research on Facebook marketing lately to see if it’s worth my time to run a PPC campaign or not, and I stumbled across this simple trick to lowering the price you pay per click on Facebook!
The battle for social media supremacy is about to get interesting with Google+ entering the arena. Facebook really doesn’t have much to worry about , but Twitter could be replaced by Google+. Ryan Single gives a first look at Google+ here and Peter Yared from VentureBeat explains how Google+ could make Twitter the next Myspace:
“There are numerous comparisons between Google’s new Google+ social offering and Facebook, but most of them miss the mark. Google knows the social train has left the station and there is a very slim chance of catching up with Facebook’s 750 million active users. However, Twitter’s position as a broadcast platform for 21 million active publishers is a much more achievable goal for Google to reach…
… So, how can Google go after the 21 million people who are actively publishing on Twitter, and, more importantly, the few thousands that own the majority of Twitter followers? These types of posters are generally publishers, and Google’s core competence is serving publishers. Publishers pay a lot of attention to Google, from search engine optimization to increase the ranking on Google searches, search engine marketing keyword ads to drive traffic, and on-site advertising solutions ranging from AdSense to DoubleClick.
Publishers are interested in increasing their search rankings and improving their reach. Posting content to Google+1 increases search rankings. The black toolbar across the top of all Google services (other than YouTube), which integrates both Google+ and Google+ notifications, definitely provides reach and is now in front of as many user minutes as Facebook commands. Users commenting or liking on items from publishers will show up in their friends’ toolbars. Even if they only have a few friends, the overall traffic bump will be significant. The Google+ bar has not yet been activated on YouTube, a key publisher and celebrity channel, and likely will broadcast YouTube likes, comments and shares.
While Facebook is not sweating about Google+, the threat to Twitter is significant. Google has the opportunity to displace Twitter if it gets publishers and celebrities to encourage Google+ follows on their websites as well as pushing posts to the legions of Google users while they are in Search, Gmail and YouTube. Google was turned down when it tried to buy Twitter for $10 billion, and now it is going to try to replicate it. With Google+, the company actually has a shot.”
We’re all familiar with the Facebook “like” button that we can integrate into our websites or blogs. However, when somebody “likes” something, on Facebook it shows up in their news feed for all to see. Sometimes it’s something that we don’t want to have just show up on our news feed. Setimes we would rather send that content to an individual or group of people specifically. Well, now we can. Today I’d like to introduce the new “send” button, “the easiest way to privately share things with groups and individuals”.
“The Send button is a social plugin that websites can use to let people send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual. For example, if you see a Mother’s Day gift idea on 1-800-Flowers.com, you can now send a message or email to your family members to discuss. Or say you’re training for a marathon and you come across a great article about running shoes on The Huffington Post. Now you can share it with your entire running group in just one click.
The Send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested. They don’t need to leave the web page they’re on or fill out a long, annoying form. Compared to the alternatives, the Send button has fewer required steps, and it removes the need to look up email addresses by auto-suggesting friends and Groups.
We designed the Send button to be used alongside the Like button. By including both on your website, people will have ability to broadcast the things they like and also send it to specific people.”
