Category Archives: Social Media

How Forbes & Harvard Business Review shoot themselves in the foot on Stumbleupon

July 6, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Forbes and Harvard Business Review are two of the largest and most interesting business publications out there. Yet, every time I visit their blogs online there are annoying intermediary pages that I have to click the “skip” button. I am on about ten social media platforms and I visit them each several times a week. I found that an article I published on Twitter about how meditation changes your brain became very popular with a crowd that was interested in marketing of all things. So, I published yet another article about spirituality with a title including the word “mindfulness” and how it affects your brain. Another success. The very next day, I decided that my Stumbleupon followers would love to read about meditation and the brain, so I sourced some articles from Google.

The first articles that showed up were from Forbes and HBR. Unfortunately, the page that first came up from HBR was completely black with a “skip” button and a pop up. I think they were trying to strong-arm me into joining their newsletter. When I published the article on Stumbleupon, the photo section showed a black page — how unattractive. HBR might be getting lots of followers on their newsletter, but they are basically outcasting themselves from having a chance to ever make it on Stumbleupon! Forbes basically does the same thing except they make you wait twenty seconds before you skip their advertisement. How annoying.

As with any other business decision, you gain in one place and you lose in another. But, ruining your chances on social media is not a good decision in 2015, especially when the networks are focusing so heavily on photos! If I were running a huge blog, I would have very expensive and clear photos that appear before anything else. You might ask why I am not doing this now. The answer is that we are a very small blog and our budget doesn’t permit for that — yet!

You should give people “x” days to follow you back on Twitter, right?

June 30, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged | Leave a comment

There are Twitter experts who have hundreds of thousands of followers who advise others. Should you take advice from these “experts?” Well, they sort of are experts since they have proven their ability to gain followers that engage. However, they don’t know your individual business. Specific knowledge about how to market your particular business is much more valuable than generalized industry knowledge about social media. If the industry standard is that you should tweet at 4pm, but you get better results at 7pm, then post more at 7pm. The key is to know how to do your own analytics and your own quick experiments and get valuable results even if they are not fine-tuned to NASA standards.

How many days do you give?
I was advised to give anywhere from 2-14 days for someone to follow me back on Twitter. Since I am aggressive on Twitter and follow up to 1000 individuals per day, I need to unfollow people so I can follow more people. I don’t have fourteen days for someone to follow me back. What I observed was really interesting. People involved in Marketing follow me back much more quickly on Twitter than those involved in technical trades such as programming, web design, call center, medical billing, etc. I can get excellent results from the Marketing crowd if I give them two or three days. But, the techies need more like three to five days. Of course on Twitter, the law of diminishing marginal return does apply. I tend to get lots of follow backs the first six hours after I follow people. Each hour or day that passes the follow back rate diminishes. It is up to you how to decide how many days to wait!

One trick I use
Rather than unfollow people at the top of my follow list after two or three days, I unfollow the next day in many cases. However, I don’t unfollow from the top. I will scroll 1000 listings down, so I get the folks I followed 48 hours ago and unfollow them if they didn’t follow me back. This technique enables me to follow and unfollow large quantities of people daily which allows me to grow a lot more quickly. You have to have more people following you than you are following to be able to use this technique.

If I follow 8000 and 10000 are following me, then Twitter will allow me to follow up to 10,000 + 10%. So, I’ll follow 1000 per day until I get to 11.000 and then unfollow from 1000 down the list the next day. That way I am always following 2000 new people at any given time.

Passive Social Media growth is exciting

June 29, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Many of us are very active on social media. It has been my obsession because my SEO power depends on it. Maybe one day if I get a little smarter, people will hire me to be a consultant. I have read many blogs where the “experts” tell us to focus on one social media account and really grow it big. This makes sense. If you have ten little social media accounts, you will publish your article ten times and get hardly any clicks for your labor. But, with one big account, you can publish one post, and get a landslide of activity. This is the reality of my Facebook account. Our best post got us 1000+ clicks, and we get tons of new customers from this network! Lucky me.

I work hard on my Twitter campaign, but it has little to show. However, I just started a Google+ group for my notary directory. We are getting people coming out of the woodwork who already know us, who want to join my network. I don’t have to do much other than to just have a presence with a few posts and I get hundreds of followers.

I’m using the wisdom of Aikido which is a Japanese martial art where you use the force of your opponent against him. It is sort of a Zen principle of sorts. The same can be applied to social media. If you are unique in your industry, just be being present on a particular social channel, people will come looking for you. Let them do the work instead of you.

We started a Linked In campaign a few years ago. We didn’t promote it at all. We just added a link from our home page and we got almost 2000 followers (many are very active too) in a few years. But, we did almost nothing. Now, we are publishing really interesting articles and discussion topics and growing even more.

I’m not encouraging anyone to be lazy, but there are ways to benefit from social media while doing the minimum. These ways should not be overlooked!

Visit our Google+ profile

June 15, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , | Leave a comment

We have a new and very interesting Google+ profile. It has links to great outsourcing, business, and other interesting articles from our social media networks as well as breathtaking travel photos, and more… Join us!

https://plus.google.com/112865765811209268597/posts

Hope you like it!

Why you Should Hire a Comedian Instead of a CEO to Co-Blog.

June 13, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Humor, Popular on Twitter, Semi-Popular, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Carbonating my Business Blog with Some Fizz
I am a business person, and if you read my blog regularly, it is likely that you are too! I struggled for a long time to find people who could help me blog. Sometimes people would think of generic sounding topics while others came up with bizarre and interesting stories. However, to have a constant supply of zany and interesting ideas, I needed more. Since I am a business person and very active on social media, I am bombarded with blog titles of every description and have no trouble thinking of more. I can easily write about business themes. So, if I hired someone with a business mind just like me, what would be the point — we already have a business mind here. What readers like, is some pizazz, and some clever jokes thrown in — and some professional proofreading never hurts ether — make that “either”.

Business + Humor = Success
Laugh and the world blogs with you. As a writer for three blogs, I like to throw some humor in on a regular basis. However, as a shrewd businessman, I’m shrewd enough to know I have no business writing comedy! The point is to align two different types of minds with different but complementary skills. In my case, I have a business-oriented mind with some industry-specific knowledge. My comedy writer is not only a comedian, but is a seasoned writer capable of professional proofreading — and that’s no joke. (The last time I put an ad in the paper for a seasoned writer, I got a Cajun guy from Baton Rouge with absolutely no experience applying for the job!)

Collaborative Brainstorming With Finesse
My writer and I join forces and in an hour can brainstorm more than a dozen interesting and funny blog titles. Then, we sometimes work together to develop themes. The actual writing of the blog might be done by him, or by myself and then “touched up” by him. He’ll clean up some small mistakes, find some areas that need finessing, and he’ll also ramp up the humor wherever possible. The other people I interviewed either couldn’t think of even one blog title, or came up with titles that sounded as cookie cutter and generic as the description cookie cutter and generic. My comedy writer comes up with stuff that is off the wall, but that is always a hit with both of the industries that I cater to.

Two Similar Minds — a Two Headed Monster?
If two like-minded business people wrote blogs together, there would be no jokes. They would debate whether or not to have pie charts, or graphs. Whether to cater to the lay-person, or higher level professionals. You might learn something before falling into a deep slumber reading their informative articles. If my comedy writer worked over their blog, he would chuck the charts and throw the pie graphs in their faces and start all over again to find a more laughable way to present the facts! Graphs and charts enhance the digestibility of information, but without a spoonful of sugar, the medicine won’t go down.

Incompatible Minds
On the other hand, if you partner up with someone whose thoughts are completely out of sync with yours, you won’t get anywhere collaborating. Finding your perfect match is not easy in the writing world. Rather than a comedian, it could be a stunt driver or a bartender — and I’ll drink to that, preferably not while stunt driving! But, whatever you do, don’t hire a CEO to help you with your business blog!

You might also like:

A standup comedian at a standup restaurant in India
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/12/21/a-stand-up-comedian-at-a-stand-up-restaurant-in-india-2015/

Change your brain by the people you are with
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/11/11/change-your-brain-by-the-people-you-are-with/

A new specialty for your call center — suicide hotline
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2016/06/12/a-new-specialty-for-your-call-center-suicide-hotline/

Zen and the Art of Collaborative Blogging

June 11, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Collaborative blogging is the art of assembling complete blog articles using components created by two or more individuals.

Are You a “Collablogator?”
There are many ways to collaborate. One person might focus on overall themes while another could zero in on specific topics. Other skills could include polishing, proofreading, and even the final addition of the blog article to a WordPress platform. Some “collablogators” invent titles together (if not words) and even write blogs on the phone with each other if not in person. But the partnership only works if both individuals live up to their collablogations.

Partner Selection
This could be the most crucial choosing of a partner that doesn’t require a prenup you’ll ever do. You should ideally find one whose strengths make up for your weaknesses, and vice versa. If you’re an industry specific person, you might pair well with someone good at proofreading. If you tend to be more serious, you might pair well with a funny person. If you’re a content-oriented person, you might pair well with someone who excels at style, presentation, and execution.

At what time of the day is your creative sweet spot? Do you burn the midnight oil along with the virtual page with your brilliance? Is your partner more in the zone after he’s had his morning coffee and the afternoon mail has yet to arrive? In that case, work separately, not simultaneously!

Assembly Line Blogging
Some people blog together at the same time while others divide blogging into many separate outsourced tasks that happen consecutively. The boss might come up with a theme, a creative person might come up with a great title, another person might do the writing, before someone else polishes and proofreads. The final step: Publishing the blog online. But, there’s more — with the popularity of social media, the cherry on top would be creating popular tweets for the blog entry. The biggest issue with assembly line blogging is that if any of the team members are behind schedule, a la Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory, your efficiency could dessert you!

Outsourcing Some of the Processes
There are thousands of eager blog writers in India who can write blog articles for $5-12 and are more than happy to research industry-specific content. Proofreading is a higher level task that is best left to a seasoned professional. However, there are many people with this specific skill. The hardest position to fill in your blogsembly line is the idea creator. Sure, the boss knows he wants to write about the financial crisis in Myanmar, but coming up with a specific and catchy title is not easy even for the most highly skilled writers. If you are hiring a team, evaluate each member’s skill at each of the stages in the assembly line.

Comparing Blog Assembly to Henry Ford’s System
On the auto assembly line, you’re faced with manufacturing new models every year. On the blog assembly line, there’s a new model every blog! In each of these cases, the aim is for greater mileage. Ways to improve mileage on your blogs? Make them understandable in ways that surprise and, if possible, enlighten. Make them candidates for retweeting. Assembly line blogging can not only speed up the process, but take advantage of those who specialize in individual components. If you have residual such specialist “understudies” waiting in the wings, they can take over if and when the “star” assembly line expert becomes unavailable. On the car assembly line, there can only be one person at the station and they all have to be there at the same time. On the blog assembly line, you could have multiple people at each stage of the process. And any one member could pass off their work to whichever stage two member was most readily available. Each could be in a different country or work a different shift, as long as they’re all on the same page.

I have to end this blog prematurely because my blog writing union just informed me that we are on strike.

Hitting the 10,000 mark on Twitter!

May 23, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Semi-Popular, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I just hit the 10,000 mark on one of my Twitter accounts. It is kind of exciting. Not as exciting as hitting 100,000, but still good. Since that account is in a niche market, the potential for future growth looks slow. But, there is still potential in the long run, retweeted posts don’t go anywhere because the friends of industry specific people are not in the same industry. My other account which is more of a general business and social media account appeals to a much larger cut of society leaving my retweets sometimes going viral on a good day.

I know it all now — I think!
I think that the bigger issue is that I feel I have “figured out” Twitter, and Google+. I have done well on Facebook. My success path seems paved for me, although I have only achieved a small success so far. I know what to do now. I know I can get that big success. It is just a factor of doing more repetitive work, or outsourcing the work to someone else.

The most important thing is your account name!
One lesson I’ve learned about social media, is the biggest factor that can cause your ultimate success or failure is your name. Not your personal name — your account name. It’s a little like the old days. If you grew up 60 years ago in the formerly mostly Jewish Lower East Side and your name was Noddington, you just won’t be as popular as if your name was Horowitz!

I want to master more networks
I want to ultimately do social media consulting. But, I want to be the best one. I want to know the top ten networks really well. Even if I don’t physically manage them, I want to supervise and do the strategy work. For me it is all about the strategy, not the leg work, although it is good to be good at both.

I’m not sure what the future holds for me, but in my account with 10,000 followers, I’m changing the focus from acquiring more followers to posting more and milking the network for clicks. Wish me well! It will be fun to see what the future holds for my other accounts!

Pinterest is really cool with the various boards & amazing pictures

May 13, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I am always the last one to try a new social network. But, now I feel that my future depends on it. I want to be a social media expert, so I am trying new things. I am stumbling, pinning, posting, tweeting, and might do some snapping soon too.

Pinterest is cool
The thing I like about Pinterest is that you can create different boards. Other social media platforms don’t have this characteristic to my knowledge. Google lets you have circles for your followees, and Twitter lets you have lists. Facebook is complicated and someone else handles that for me. But, Pinterest lets you have interest specific boards in your account to post on. I fill these boards with great looking pictures that other people posted and then post a few of my own articles too.

Followers?
So far, after several very quick sessions on Pinterest, I have accumulated 14 followers! Wow. And 12 were in the last 24 hours. I think I’m on to something. I can’t say for sure, but it might be easier to attract followers on Pinterest than on any other network. I’ll have to do some real research and takes notes to be sure about that. It will be interesting to see if I get any clicks out of Pinterest as well.

More clicks please…
I would love a new source of clicks. The other thing I like about Pinterest is that it is not huge yet like Facebook and Twitter. The big accounts in my industry on other mediums have between 4000 and 50,000 followers. On Pinterest, they only have about 1000, so it will be easy to play catch up ball and overtake them! I love outdoing others!

I’ll keep my readers informed as to how my future in Pinterest goes. As a general rule, if you want your business to do well these days, try to do well on social media. It can really get you a lot of customers and some great exposure!

18 ways to boost your social media marketing in 10 minutes / day!

May 5, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Popular on Twitter, Semi-Popular, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We all love social media, but how many of us are good at it? It is a full time devotion to really be good at social media, and that is only if you are smart and keep your eyes open. But, not all of us have full time to work on our Twitter or Facebook accounts. So, what are the quick ways to get ahead? How can I take my magic social media pill and go viral tonight? Here’s how!

Here are some effective things you can do in 10 minutes per day or less!

(1) Follow people who share a lot in 10 minutes per day!
You can find sharers on Twitter, Google Plus and other mediums. If you click on articles that got shared a lot, you can see who the sharers are on Twitter. It is easy. Just be prepared to have your inbox filled with other irrelevant junk they shared. If you get shared a lot on Twitter or other mediums, you can grow fast. Following sharers will give them a chance to follow you back and share the hell out of your content. Many big accounts on Twitter only get a few shares per post. You can have a small account and get up to 15 shares per post using my simple technique. The people you follow who share must be semi-relevant or my strategy will backfire! 10 minutes a day of following sharers will change your life!

(2) The mute function on Twitter contains the chatter
Tired of people who tweet too much Twitter litter? Try the mute function. That way you are still officially following them, but you don’t have to hear any of the chatter. Oh what a relief it is. Just spend two or three minutes muting annoying people and you’ll be all the happier.

(3) Lists on Twitter isolate winning content in minutes!
You can favorite a tweet, but Google circles and Lists on Twitter allow you to arrange your favorite followers into lists. I get lots of great content to retweet by putting my best several dozen in my various segmented lists. I mostly ignore the others, but don’t tell them that. It’s nothing personal, but their tweets are not all that! Segmenting your top followers into lists takes only minutes!

(4) Boost your follow-backs by 50% overnight
We all follow people on Twitter, and we all retweet. However, we mostly do this the wrong way. Let’s say I am going to target politically interested people. I might get my followers from Obama’s Twitter. If you want the maximum percent of them to follow you back, retweet Obama’s best tweet from the last two or three days, and retweet some other hot political content. Your follow-back rate will go up by about 50% just from this simple yet logical technique.

(5) Google+ communities are a gold mine, but…
Google+ is a hard medium to grow on. The actual process of following people takes time, and they limit how many you can follow. Follow back percentage rates are low even with the most relevant of followers. So, what is the secret to Google+? The secret is to grow a community. Although it takes work to grow Google+ communities to a critical mass where you’ll be seen on big keywords, it pays. You’ll get a waterfall of new followers if you include a big keyword in your community name and get critical mass. You can grow a Google+ community in 10 minutes per day, but you would be better off outsourcing this task to India and have them spend four hours a day inviting people from 20 different accounts to your single community.

(6) Facebook: test and isolate your winning content
Facebook gets me more traffic than anywhere else. But, you cannot use it ramdomly. Use it strategically. Test out any of your content that you feel is promising. Then, track your stats, isolate the top 5% of your content, and use Facebook PPC to promote those posts. I did this and went from 300 clicks a month to 5700 three months later on Facebook. I am still in a state of shock. It takes only minutes to identify your best content, but the reward will make you happy for hours!

.

You might also like:
Facebook knows you better than your mama, but how well do you know your customers?
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/10/03/facebook-knows-you-better-than-your-mama-but-how-well-do-you-know-your-customers/

How to use the right keywords in your blog titles that lead to instant popularity
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/09/17/how-to-use-the-right-keywords-in-your-blog-titles-that-lead-to-instant-popularity/

Pimp my Tweet — a BPO company specializing in Twitter
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/09/16/pimp-my-tweet-a-bpo-company-specializing-in-twitter/

.

(7) Experiment with different post titles
If you post the same old thing the same old way, you’ll get mediocre results. But, what if you find hot new ways to promote your content? I will often write up to ten tweets for a single post just to see which one does the best? The way you write your post titles can affect your traffic. A winning title can get you 10x the clicks! A few extra minutes experimenting with post titles will change your entire profile’s performance overnight!

(8) Post other people’s winning content as well.
Yes, post your own content, and yes, post the best of your content over and over again. But, to gain popularity, diversity of articles sells. I run an outsourcing blog, but I post tons of general business articles from Entrepreneur, Inc., Forbes and other popular magazines. They write really interesting stuff, and I use it to my benefit. I sometimes retweet them, and other times rewrite a title and post it under my own account on various social media channels. This gets me tons of shares, tons of growth, and takes only minutes per day. If you prefer, you can spend four hours at a time, and prefer all of your tweets for the next month all in one shot. But, remember, if you post other people’s content, make sure it is winning content that your followers will enjoy reading.

(9) Post more often on Twitter
Many people post one or two tweets a day on Twitter. There is nothing wrong with this. But, if your account is big enough, you might consider posting 24 hours a day using a system that you can input the posts ahead of time. If you are posting 24 hours a day once or twice per hour, you will reach a lot of people who would never notice you otherwise.

(10) Posting 2x per day on Facebook got me 4x the clicks
2×1 = 4. In math it doesn’t, but on Facebook it does. I posted double the content and got quadruple the clicks. The secret here is that by posting more, your audience becomes more engaged and visits your page more often. If they visit more, then you will get more clicks and shares. So, 2×1 = 4 Do the math… or in this case, don’t do the math. Finding out what frequency to post is critical in social media, so experiment.

(11) Post at the right time on your mediums.
I tested out what times my Twitter audience for my notary twitter was at it’s best. 10:30 am to 3pm was the peak. I got 50% more shares then than at other times of the day. Late at night did particularly poorly. Unfortunately I’m up all night, so I do better when my social media manager can pre-publish my tweets to go off at the ideal time. Put in the same effort tweeting, but tweet at the right time, and get up to double the benefit!

(12) Try a dozen social media platforms, but focus on one
Many of us try to do too much. But, you need a pecking order for which social media platforms you use. The one that gets you the best performance needs to be first on your list. Sure it is good to be found everywhere, but certain accounts only merit a few minutes twice a week while your bread and butter deserve at least 10 minutes per day, perhaps up to an hour. If you allocate your time strategically, you’ll get a lot more out of each hour you spend on social media. I did exactly this. I used to spend an hour per month creating my Facebook post list. Now, I spend four hours, and my results went from 300 clicks per month to 5700 clicks per month. That was the account that panned out, and it became a gold mine after I allocated my time strategically.

(13) Grow it fast & milk it
Social media campaigns generally do not give you much fruit until they are huge. They have the same growth pattern as trees. Some trees will never grow that well no matter what you do while others will grow fast if given the ideal soil, fertilizer and love. Rather than spending an hour per week evenly distributed between five social media platforms, it makes sense to find the one that grows fast and delivers results and crank it. Find a way to grow it huge, and then you’ll get a Niagara Falls of traffic and perhaps SEO popularity from it. If you grow your Twitter to 100,000, you only spend 40 seconds pasting in your tweet, but it will reach 1/10th of a million people and probably get shared a lot too. If you have five accounts with 20,000, you spend five times the effort to reach the same quantity of people!

(14) Blog writing strategies in a nutshell
Write about whatever you want to. But, remember that the blog content you share can tell you a lot about what you should be writing about. If you share an article about Zen and the art of political sabotage and your crowd likes it, then you should try to write your own blog entry with a similar title, but with content designed by you. Your version of the article is likely to be a lot more popular than your average idea simply because you based it on a winner.

(15) Use what I call keyword anchors.
I’m not sure how other people use these terms in an internet context, but to me a keyword anchor is a term that is hot in the industry. It is sort of like having a Macy’s in a mall at the end of a long hallway. You know that Macy’s will attract traffic because they are famous, and they are hot. I write blogs and share content all the time, and I study what is hot. In the context of tech business, posts about Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Google, Starbucks, Cloud Technology, Apps, or other popular topics generate a lot of clicks. There are also more general anchors like pets, cats, wine, food, and other topics that please the masses. People are familiar with these people or concepts and will relate and like your articles more easily because you integrated these into your blogs. So, if you want to write about an office party you are planning. You might consider writing about how Google throws an office party and then integrate your personal office party into the blog entry somehow. Tying themes together is the secret to popular blogging — try it! It’s not hard.

(16) How to get over “idea block” which is similar to writers’ block.
Can’t think of ideas for what to write about? Just read what others are writing about. The more you create, the more creative juices you’ll have and the more you read, the most collective knowledge will be in your head which will help you think of ideas and write better.

(17) Optimize the sources you get your followers from
Are you spending an hour a day following people on social media? Are they the right people? Think of people in terms of the groups they are associated with first. After all, you are sourcing your leads from particular sources. If you get your business followers from Forbes, track how many of them follow you back in a 48 hour period. Then, follow people from Wall Street Journal. See if the percentage goes up or down. Keep in mind that the follow back rate can vary based on what you tweeted more recently, so keep that relatively constant so you don’t ruin your experiment. You can increase your follow back rate up to 30% by following a more optimized relevant source!

(18) Crank them out
Like to write blog articles? Not all of them need to be perfectly written. The important thing is to churn them out. As a blog manager, you need quantity on your blog. If you find out that a particular article was popular, you can spend two hours with your professional writer friend touching it up or rewriting it. In the mean time, see which themes are working for you. I can write an average of four articles per hour. But, if I do refined work it could easily take four hours for one piece. Four hours makes sense for something that got 1000 views so far, but for something that will only get 20 views? I don’t think so!

.

You might also like:

How to choose which posts to share on social media and how often
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2016/04/08/how-to-choose-which-posts-to-share-on-social-media-how-often/

99 ways to die in social media — choose one!
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2016/01/05/99-ways-to-die-in-social-media-choose-one/

How to get half a million followers on Twitter
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/12/01/how-to-be-as-successful-as-scott-eddy-on-twitter-get-500000-followers/

.

A tale of 4 social media managers

May 3, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Here is a short tale of 4 Italian brothers. All of whom were social media managers in the United States. Each brother had a different idea of how to manage their business and we’ll soon see how well each of them did.

Brother #1 Luigi.
Luigi knew that his customers didn’t know the difference. So, he hired people right out of school to work on critical social media projects for large businesses, restaurants, hotels, etc. None of the accounts got any significant growth. Posts were published with no type of efficiency in terms of # of posts per hour of labor. There was no insights about how to go viral on any of the posts, and nobody cared either. The employees were not invested in being a social media success. The boss didn’t care. And the customers didn’t know any better. These employees were the least expensive employees you could get in the United States. But, after you added in the office space they took up, medical, dental, unemployment tax, and other mandatory deductions, these inexpensive employees who produced minimal results weren’t that cheap in the long run.

Additionally, they quit their job on average after twelve months of labor which presented more challenges. Long after the fact, Luigi started to notice that the employees slacked off and didn’t do more than 60% of their responsibilities in the two or three months before they quit. They were not cheap to train either, and every time someone quit, they had to go through a long interview process to hire someone new, and then train them only to have the same thing happen again. After a few years of this, Luigi wanted to grow his business. But, his business just wouldn’t grow. He began to think about a change of pace while he sipped on his afternoon espresso.

Brother #2 Guido
Guido was a perfectionist. When he went out to eat, he would only go to the classiest of Italian restaurants that managed each detail of the entire food creation process. He would sniff the desserts from four feet away to verify the acumen of the cook and his perfectionist tendencies too. The blackberry tart filled the air with freshness that Guido treasured, and he showered the entire staff with compliments about the superior quality of their food.

Guido only hired the best. He wouldn’t even talk to you if you had less than six years of experience. Additionally, he had a very complicated social media test that even the best couldn’t pass. So, he settled for creating a pecking order with new hires based on how successful their previous campaigns had been, and how many points they got on his test. He was disappointed that the best only got 40-55% on his test, but he figured that he could teach them the rest.

To justify the costs of his expensive employees, he had to charge a lot more for his services than others. On a brighter note, his customers loved him just as he loved the Italian pastry chef down the street who made the blackberry tart. He had no problem growing, because he offered the highest quality of service which was hard… well, in actuality impossible to find apart from him. He regularly got viral posts for his clients, and their accounts grew from fledgling to goliaths in only a year or two due to how capable his dedicated staff was. His attrition rate was very low as his office was a fun place to be and he got them all an endless supply of pastries to thank them for their amazing contributions.

Brother #3 Antonio
Antonio was the international brother of the four. He loved to travel to different countries. Not just European countries, but Africa and India as well. He loved coffee, and loved the way the Indians made chai, coffee, and fresh juices. He loved to meditate in the Himalayas, and had developed some contacts in India as well. He didn’t want to pay big bucks to have some mediocre Americans working for him. He hired talented people in India and set up an office there. He got a decent quality of labor for pennies on the dollar and offered a very low cost social media service. He was popular and his business grew because he offered more service for less, and with good customer service as he was practically a native speaker of English, Italian, French, and knew five other languages as well. He hired a few others who spoke English perfectly who could do sales and customer service. Antonio’s business model was high quality, popular, and inexpensive relative to the American equivalents. He competed well with the less expensive Indian alternatives beautifully as his employees delivered reliable results with excellent communication while the competition fell on their incompetent faces.

Brother #4 Giovanni
Giovanni was the smart one of the four. He had some of the same characteristics of all of the other brothers fused together. He knew this and he used it to his advantage. He was not in love with India, but made a few visits from time to time to see Antonio and get a sense of what the country had to offer. He liked how Luigi got affordable labor, but didn’t like the quality issues. He respected Guido for being a perfectionist as well. Giovanni had all of these characteristics in one human body. But Giovanni was going to find a better way to do business.

Giovanni decided that he would create a tri-national team. He would have Americans, Filipinos, and Indians all working together. He would find the best communicators, the best analysts, the finest writers, and the least expensive source of labor to do repetitive tasks like posting content on Twitter, etc. Giovanni knew that in general, Americans were better at communicating complicated ideas while Filipinos were better at customer service. He also knew that India was a good source of inexpensive technical labor and SEO specialists. However, he knew that he might find talent in unexpected places too, so he kept himself open.

He set up his sales and analysis office in the United States which is where he started. Later on he set up a customer service and general tasks office in Manila and another office for SEO and general tasks in India. Giovanni was getting his labor for US$3.00 per hour while his brother Luigi (who took pride in his ability to save money) was paying $35,000 per year plus medical, dental, unemployment insurance and other expenses. Giovanni was able to grow a Twitter account from scratch and get 100,000 followers in just a year. He hired the best analysts from America and India to compete with each other to find the best posts. Once he found who could get better posts for each dollar he spent, he hired that person to be the main analyst. He was able to hire people in Manila to post 48 times a day for each Twitter account which got them even more followers. And they also followed 1000 people three times a week on their accounts to get them even more followers. These Twitter accounts changed the SEO ranking of the sites for the businesses they represented, and they also were experts at Facebook, and a dozen other social media platforms.

Giovanni tapped into the world market to find the best analysts at the best price, the cheapest reliable labor, SEO, article writers for every niche and more. His business was so successful that he grew out of control. He offered the best quality:price ratio of any business of its type in the world and he became a multi-millionaire after a few years as a result.

Giovanni is not a real person, but he took advantage of what I call the bi-national hybrid outsourcing business model. You can too!

The #1 social media mistake people make & how to resolve it!

April 9, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

I fall into the same trap here that others do. I look most at my topline — my total number of followers. Unfortunately on social media, number of followers doesn’t do you any good. It is your ROI that counts, and that is not so easy to measure. There are many things that a marketing professional could measure when evaluating their social media presence.

(1) Total number of interactions.
(2) Number of “involved” interactions where there is a continuing dialogue (good for SEO)
(3) Number of shares, or favorites
(4) Number of clicks (my favorite metric as that gives me my bottom line social media goal of traffic)
(5) Number of form submissions

Measuring ROI
Most marketers do not measure the ROI of their social media investment which is a huge problem. If you don’t know which of your social media accounts is delivering the best results, how will you know where to put your efforts in the future? For me, I know that I get most of my traffic from my Facebook profile. I still invest in my other profiles, but the biggest investment goes to my account with the best ROI which is Facebook. Additionally, I would like to mention that my other accounts are still in the experimental stage and it is too early to judge them.

Setting Goals
Many marketers have wishy-washy social media goals. Perhaps they want to boost brand awareness or get more interactions. It makes most sense to put a dollar value on what each metric means to you, and how much of each metric you want to get. You can also measure what the dollar value is of what you are putting in and what you are getting out. Remember, that social media is like a snowball, and after you have mature large accounts, it is easy to get a lot more out while putting a lot less in.

Certain social media platforms such as Linked In or Google Plus allow for the creation of communities. You can set goals for how large your communities should be by a particular date. If you know the growth rate and how much time investment is necessary to reach that rate, then you can plan effectively. My current goal for my Linked In group is to get 200 new followers per month. If I hire offshore labor to help me with outreach, I could expand that to 2000 new followers per month since overseas labor is a lot less expensive (but, hopefully as good — we’ll find out.)

Allocating Hours
You know how you take a 45 minute walk once a day, and allow 1 hour for lunch? Social media needs to be timed the same way, otherwise it can get out of control. You need to decide how much time per day or week you will allow for social media. Then, break it down into accounts. You will spend thirty minutes per day on Facebook, but only ten minutes twice a week on Twitter. You will write one blog article per week as well. You might need to reevaluate your plan once or twice a year. But, see what works for your business and your life and adjust from there.

ROI vs. Estimated ROI
If you can calculate what your Facebook profile is worth to you with 4000 followers in terms of monthly revenue from additional exposure, then you might be able to guess the future value. The value of social media marketing is not constant over time. Empires rise, and empires fall making the future of your campaigns hard to predict. If you invest five hours a week into your Facebook profile and it produces $2000 of value to you through traffic, sales, or other more obscure metrics, then if your profile continues to grow, it might be worth a lot more than that once it has grown. On the other hand if you invest nothing but time in a particular profile, but get negligible results, it might be time to stop using that profile or just put it on the back burner devoting only a few minutes per week to post a few of your most critical links.

If you aren’t using social media right…
If you don’t use social media “the right way” then you won’t get any ROI to analyze. You need captivating articles, interesting discussions, and links to your important pages for SEO. If you only self-promote and bore everyone, you’ll lose followers. If you only post interesting articles, but don’t do anything for your SEO benefit, then you will not get the full benefit from social media. Learn how to get the most of all of your accounts. They all help, but in different ways. Using what I know now, I might be able to use Twitter for 20 minutes a week and get more benefit than you get using social media an hour a day!

Top Viral Images, and how they spread.

April 5, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Semi-Popular, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Mastering the art of knowing what is viral and why is a fascinating undertaking. Knowing exactly the twists and turns it takes to spread is even more interesting. But, what spreads more — images, great articles, or videos? The answer is that images tend to be more popular, but the spread of various types of content depends heavily on the particular medium. Text tweets can do very well on Twitter, while a good vertical photo can do miracles on Google Plus.

Appeal to the general public
One thing to understand about viral content is that is needs to appeal to the general public. If you have a post about widgets, only people who like widgets will share that post. The people they share it with will not likely enjoy widgets which means the sharing will end right there and the post will not go viral.

Where does content spread?
Viral content can be spread on blogs, forums, social networks, web sites, and company intranets.

What types of posts go viral?
Popular images might make a point, tell a quick story, or appeal to people on an emotional level. Being funny or entertaining generally helps. But, your image or post needs to appeal to the masses. It could be a breath taking photo, or something that makes you start laughing at first glance. Or it could be something really interesting.

Integrating industry specific with viral themes
One technique that sophisticated marketers use these days is to integrate popular themes into industry specific blog entries. If you are writing about widgets, you could write about how your puppies are happy the minute they see a widget, or how you love enjoying a widget with your morning mocha. You would be surprised at how powerful pets and coffee are in social media.

Tracking the viral flow
Once an image goes viral, it is difficult to track how it spread. It might be easier to follow the expansion of a particular post on a particular network like Twitter for example. For an image to go viral, it needs to be published by a particular account. Then, at least one of the accounts following that account need to share the content again. The reason why even the best content out there rarely goes viral is:

What can go wrong
(1) The account posting doesn’t have many followers, or doesn’t have many active followers

(2) At any particular moment in time, less than 1% of your Twitter followers are on Twitter and will have the chance to perhaps see your post.

(3) If you do get shared, the follower who shared your post may not have that many followers. If you have 10,000 followers, and only one shares your post and that one has only 10 followers, your post will not get seen.

(4) If you do get shared, but the people following the people who follow you don’t find your post interesting because they are in a different industry or have different interests, there goes your virality!

(5) You posted your post at the wrong time of the day

(6) Group consciousness would have liked your post in 2011, but not in 2015 for some unknown reason.

Summary
To really go viral, you need to attract the attention of what Vegas casinos call “Whales.” You need a few really huge accounts to retweet you, or at least a lot of somewhat large accounts. That way the message has a chance to spread, and keep spreading. You need a really hot post, and a lot of luck too. Sometimes a hot post will spread like crazy. Then, it will die down. Post the same thing a month later, and nobody is interested. My suggestion — pray to the viral gods — put your destiny in their hands.