Tag Archives: Social Media Channels

Social Media: The winning content happens by accident

May 12, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

I have read hundreds of articles about social media. The advice is very vague and looks more like a point by point and blow by blow guide to a big question mark. Yes, certain social media channels might work better with your audience than others, and yes you have to pay attention to which works better. But, it is about having winning content.

Sometimes you will write one thousand blog articles and a handful will just be popular. They might be your worst written articles, but people might just like them. And some articles might do well if tweeted on Twitter. Of five thousand tweets on Twitter, we have a lucky three that we found by trial (twial) and error (twerror) that worked like a miracle. The stuff that worked was not serious material at all and very poorly written. It was just ridiculous content we drummed up by reading facebook posts about industry specific goofy content. Funniest things that happen to signing agents is our all time hit. I write it a few years ago. It is a random assortment of rewritten Facebook commentary. It’s not even a real article. Honey, I notarized the kids is our other best seller. It has no valuable information and is just one big dumb joke — people love it.

So, my advice is, read less blogs about how to do well on social media, and EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT. You won’t know what works until you find out by accident one night at 3am when you are going through your analytics reports!

Imagine yourself managing multiple blogs

April 20, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Running and managing blogs is not easy. But, the challenge comes about when you are running multiple unrelated blogs. We have a Notary blog that does well. We get lots of new visitors for our Notary site from the blog. The blog helps with our SEO as well. We have established social media channels that help crank traffic into the blog. All is well. It was not easy to figure out what works, but we are experienced enough now to know what our readers like. It is about tuning into your audience.

But, the problem was more when we started a 2nd blog. The outsourcing blog. Yes, it is what you are reading now. The audience is different. Instead of being purely American, there are people from all of over the world reading this. They don’t communicate with us much, or give good comments either which makes it hard to know what to write about. We can only track what gets click on and how much. The social media channels for the outsourcing blog we run didn’t work well. We tried Twitter for years, Facebook, and Linked In. I would say that Linked In gave us the most serious browsers, but the quantity was lacking and the price tag in dollars and hours spent was hurtful.

What if you do blogs for a living and run multiple blogs with a small team of people helping you. You would need to understand multiple audiences and their behavior. You would need to understand how each social media network “behaved” with each of your blogs. You would need to find writers who could be flexible in what they wrote about and who could write about anything.

The key is to be an expert at generating traffic, and quality traffic. Good traffic can turn into big dollars. If you can write about topics that are well read like finance, travel, or sports, you could become rich doing blogging. All you need is a way to figure out how to get a million visitors a month, and your cash register will get you into a million dollar house!

Tweets:
(1) Running multiple unrelated blogs is not easy. The key is studying traffic patterns
(2) When you run a blog, it is not easy to learn what works. Google Analytics helps!

You might also like:

Google’s algorithm for blogs is harder now
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2014/01/10/googles-algorithm-for-blogs-is-harder-now/

Social media optimization: checking the effectiveness of each of your campaigns
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/12/20/social-media-optimization-checking-the-effectiveness-of-each-of-your-campaigns/

It is about the quality of the interaction on social media

September 3, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Interpreting stats on social media is not easy. I have to rely on my intuition to figure out what is what. We have multiple social media channels going on and I have trouble keeping up with all of it. My social media manager handles most of it, and I review her work from time to time.

Although we found it hard to get 11 Linked In members, and easy to get 18000 Facebook members, the total number of intelligent posts from other members on Linked In exceeds what we got on Facebook for this particular account. Please keep in mind that my Facebook account for my notary site is very lively and intelligent. I am not trying to undermine Facebook as they have been a valuable resource to me. I’m just doing a quality analysis on social media commentary.

It is the quality of the followers, not how many you have. It is about how many of them post, and how good their posts are. If you get intelligent comments on one medium, that is worth a million bad quality comments on another medium. Actually bad comments are a liability because you have to remove them.

Another thing to consider is the science of how an online community grows. Does it grow like a seed and germinate? Do you see a small seedling sprouting up, that becomes a small tree, then a bigger tree, then a huge tree which eventually produces fruits? It is very unpredictable.

We have had a Notary Facebook account for years. The total number of followers continues to rise. The quality and quantity of commentary seems to have been constant for three years. We get good comments, and enough of them, but it is frustrating that we don’t see any growth in the total interactions. Out Twitter accounts seem to have regular growth in the amount of interactions and retweets. Part of it is the improved quality of our content and increased networking on our end.

My bottom line message is to forget about the top line numbers in social media. Look at the growth rates for quality interactions.