Tag Archives: Social Media

I gasp as see my Twitter clicks go from 2 a month to 42

September 4, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter is a very simple, yet complicated social media platform. It is easy to tweet. Any idiot can tweet, but the problem is that most of the people who do tweet — are idiots. I looked at my analytics for previous months and years on Twitter. As I see my evolution unfold, I am painfully reminded of how I used to not have a clue of how to effectively use Twitter. Effective use of Twitter is like an art form. You get gradually better at it over time, but nothing happens all of a sudden.

Many novices are fooled by the top line number. They think that having lots of followers is a good thing. More followers is not bad, but it doesn’t translate into any SEO realities either. The key in Twitter is to have good tweets going to good content that your audience likes! Our worst several months we were getting only about two clicks a month. After I started really taking Twitter more seriously and spending more time creating more artful tweets, my click rate went up a bit. But, after I hired a professional comedy writer, that is where I saw the real results. We peaked at 42 clicks a month and had over a dozen different people retweet us.

I used to count straight retweets, but now I am more interested in how many different people retweet us. I retweet myself from my various accounts, but that means very little to me, and even less to you. I take pride when strangers retweet my content at least once a month. If the same guy keeps retweeting me, but nobody else does, then I lose interest.

Honestly, my twitter analytics for the outsourcing site are very poor. I often question whether it is worth it to even continue with such small numbers. I want hundreds of clicks and hundreds of retweets, not a dozen new people retweeting me on a good month. My Notary Twitter on the other hand is getting thousands of clicks using the PPC program. What works for one account doesn’t necessarily work for the other. So, I’m going to have to strategize here about what to do.

My gut feeling is that it makes more sense to create more content and let Google do the work rather than slaving away trying to create great Tweets and wondering why the retweet rate is so low!

Tweets:
(1) Effective use of Twitter is like an art form. You get gradually better at it over time.
(2) The key in Twitter is to have good tweets going to good content that your audience likes!

You might also like:

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/

Your last four tweets count the most
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/12/09/your-last-four-tweets-count-the-most/

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.

Does the internet make it easier for new startups? Google sets the rules here.

September 2, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Marketing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Many people think that the internet makes everyone’s life easier. It is easier to shop on the internet because a zillion companies are competing to get you the same product at an even lower price, or with better shipping terms. But, the internet has put many bookstores out of business, and put many couriers out of business. The way we function in today’s society has completely been changed by the internet.

The internet keeps changing
The way the internet is used today is drastically different from how it was used five or ten years ago. As an internet marketer, I have to be very quick to adapt to and learn new marketing methodologies on the internet.

One world — one market
But, the fact is, that the internet makes the world, one small market place. The problem with that, is that if you are not in the top three in the planet in your market niche, you will not stand out, and probably won’t do well. On the other hand, if you have a physical location and also use the internet to strengthen your marketing, then you have the geographic advantage of being in a particular place. A hardware store in Maine, can’t compete with a hardware store in Los Angeles assuming that you aren’t going to buy the actual hardware online — and most people don’t buy heavy things online for obvious reasons.

Google makes the rules
Google sets the rules for who will do well in its kingdom. The rules are very interesting in fact. In the old days, you could have a site, do a little SEO, and you would show up well. Now, you have to do the SEO, perhaps some adwords pay-per-click, but you really need social media to do really well. My traffic would probably be less than half without social media. So, Google in essence is forcing you to become a master of social media if you want to do well.

The rules don’t favor the rich
I was beginning to think that without a huge budget, you couldn’t do well on Google. With more maturity and experience, I’m seeing that this is completely not the case. It is skill that Google rewards, not money. If you have money, you can hire a social media company that can get you all the accounts that the experts say you should have. You can get a Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, a blog, and a few others as well. They can get you followers too. A social media company can charge you anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand a month. But, the one thing a social media company can’t do, generally, is to use the social media mediums in the way that Google respects.

What does Google like
I used a lot of social media PPC. Google didn’t reward me at all for the Twitter clicks I got from PPC. The rewards came from organic clicks from twitter which were real, and resulted in longer visits to my site, and visits to more than one page per visit. I realized, that it wasn’t about budget. It was about making the system work. Google doesn’t care how many followers you have. They like the fact that you are on your blog and your twitter daily, and manually make new connections, interact with them, publish quality materials and get retweeted.

Anyone can tweet on twitter, but how many can get retweeted?
Anyone can make dumb interactions on twitter, but how many can get others to interact back and not ignore them?
Anyone can buy followers on twitter, but how many can get over a thousand relevant followers who are active?

Google understands that it is easy to buy followers. They understand that it is easy to tweet. They understand what is easy and what takes skill. Google is here to basically say that they reward you for doing what is hard, and for taking action on a daily basis rather than creating a site and letting it rot! Google rewards you for your skill and your efforts, and not for your ability to spend lots of money on services. Google is fair, Google is just. But, does Google and the internet (Google is the internet, or the internet god from my point of view) make it easier for startups?

In my opinion, the internet makes startups harder because you are competing with the entire world, and they know more than you do. On the other hand, if you are smart, and take the trouble to learn, you can outsmart those other dummies, and believe me, most of them really are dummies, and be in the big leagues in less than a decade. All if takes is really hard work, and refining your analytical thinking skills. Doing well on the internet is directly proportional to how you communicate and how analytical you are! Good luck!

Oh, and don’t forget to pray to the Google gods.
To please the regular non-internet God who we call God, he likes hard work, honesty and tithing. So, give to the Red Cross and a few homeless shelters to get on God’s good list. And to get on the Google God’s good list, interact more on Twitter and figure out how to get retweeted and clicked on.

The 20 day rule for Twitter & Google

September 2, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: SEO, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I love seeing how the mechanics of web optimization works. My life depends on it, and I am passionately interested in it. Basically, I have reduced SEO strategy down to a three simple rules.

(1) Keep your content correct, informative, well organized, and up to date. Find out what type of content people like to read, and keep giving it to them.
(2) Keep traffic constantly flowing to your site from adwords, blogs, and social media campaigns.
(3) If there is a spike in Google traffic on your blog, or Twitter activity, that peak will manifest itself on your main site’s web stats exactly 20 days later.

We had tried accelerating our Twitter interactions eight months earlier from zero to about 8 per day.. I noticed a spike in site traffic that started a few weeks after the beginning of our campaign. I wanted to try it again, because our site traffic increased by about 14%. Yes, we got about 16,000 extra followers per month. That translates into more long term income which is the final statistic in the long train of events.

So, I decided to do it again. But, I didn’t communicate clearly enough to my social media manager. She thought I wanted two interactions per day with followers. I wanted ten. So, we agreed upon seven interactions per day. Our traffic went from 28,000 per week to 30,000 on the week that had its mid-day 20 days after. Shortly after it climbed to around 31,000. Once again, about a 11% increase in a very short amount of time after we went from 2 interactions per day to 7.

I wonder what would happen if we did 30 interactions per day for a two month period. Maybe we should try!

Remember the golden rule of Twitter:
Although the top line total number of followers doesn’t mean anything, you can USE those followers who are relevant and interact with them to boost your web stats. So, the top line number actually does have a value, and a very significant value too!

How to hire an outsourced social media company!

August 29, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

What do you look for when you hire a social media company?
Or should you be Buddhist about it and look within? Don’t ask me, the answer will come from within — from within this blog article! An interesting fact that I just learned is that more people are using social media for their business than ever before, yet the man-count at social media companies has shrunk a bit. More people are doing social media for their own companies which makes sense because you need to understand your industry in order to create quality content for your social networks.

Know thyself
It is impossible in business to know how to do everything yourself, nor should you even try. However, it is very difficult to hire others to do tasks for you if you don’t know anything about the task at hand. If you are uninformed, you will get substandard results from outsourced companies, and even get ripped off regularly. The good news is that you won’t feel a thing, because you won’t even know you are being ripped off. If you hire social media companies, you need to know something about content creation and analytics to survive the ordeal.

Quality content
Unfortunately, even seasoned professionals often cannot create the best quality content without some guidance. They tend to go off on tangents and explore crazy ideas that won’t sell well with your loyal clientele. As someone who hires bloggers, Twitterers, and Facebookers, you need to know how to identify quality content. Most social media companies can’t create content on their own. They make you do the hard stuff, and they just do the minimum wage type tasks and post your content.

Analytics
If someone is handling your Twitter account, you need to be very aware of the technical process of how to operate a Twitter account. You might be managing someone who hasn’t a clue, and whose boss is not watching them. You need to know how to follow, follow back, interact, and write good tweets. You need to know if your outsourced social media company is getting you results for your money. Here are some metrics which might translate into results.

(1) New followers. If you get new followers, but they are not relevant, or don’t retweet anything, their value is limited.

(2) Clicks. If your followers don’t retweet, but they are clicking on your links and reading your blog, then you will get points with Google, and in my opinion, that is the bottom line.

(3) Retweets, favorites, mentions, etc. If you have an active crowd, you will get these, otherwise there will be silence which is bad. A good social media company will know how to bring life to your Twitter account and get people to interact.

(4) Shares and commentary. On Facebook, it is a little bit similar to Twitter. There are shares, and commentary. My experience is that Facebook followers are a lot more likely to post comments to your posts than on Twitter. If you want more of a forum type experience, then Linked in or Facebook might be your starting point.

Basically, when you hire a company to take care of your Twitter, Facebook, or other account, you need to measure their success on a monthly basis. You need to see if they are doing all of the interactions they promised to do (keep requirements in writing in emails for best results.) You need to track your total number of followers, and number of interactions as well. Basically, keep track of as much critical information as you can.

Slacking Off
Be careful. Social media companies typically hire millennials, This group tends to be very idealistic in their own way. But, if they lose interest in a project, they will not give their full 100%. Their attention span is not the greatest to begin with in any case. One guy went from 200% to 10% in a few months because he lost interest. When managing millennials, make sure they don’t lose interest, or have a change of attitude. Make sure they are not slacking off. If you notice that they are not doing what your agreement said they are to be doing, it is time to find someone new. Don’t trust whatever company you hire! Keep a close eye on them, and keep them on a short leash. I’m not saying to treat them like they are not trustworthy, just treat them like a father treats his six year old. The minute you stop watching them, all hell very easily breaks loose!

How do you interview these companies?
Most people who work at social media companies are horrible at communication and are not that knowledgeable about social media either. They know how to do certain types of repetitive tasks and certain marketing functions. Their knowledge is very rarely wide in scope. There will be a lot that they don’t know even in the most seasoned of experts. I have observed an expert who charges $250 per hour who doesn’t know how to craft a classy tweet — his tweets are very short and clunky. He is good at analytics, but not at composition. I met another expert who knows Twitter inside out, but who doesn’t know much about Google+. Here are some questions you can ask to get a sense of how these companies handle their work.

(1) Before you ask any questions, see if they even answer their phone or email. How fast before they call you back or return an email. I just emailed an American guy who runs a company in Thailand. He got back to me in 12 hours. I am very impressed!

(2) Ask them what techniques they use to grow a Twitter account. See how thorough their answer is.

(3) Tell them a little about your industry. Ask them what types of tweets they would write to attract readers. If the answer is evasive, or if they tell you that it is complicated, don’t put too much faith in them. People who have thinking skills will think of something useful to say when you ask them a question — that is the most valuable rule of interviewing companies.

(4) Tell them that you had a problem with Google+ and don’t know what the best way to solve it is. One guy told me just not to use Google+. That was not a very intelligent answer, although I agree that Google+ should not be the primary thrust of my marketing efforts.

(5) Ask to see some of their top five Twitter accounts that they manage. Send them a personal message to several of those accounts and see how they respond. If they don’t respond to you, then they won’t respond if they are handling your account. Also, by seeing the accounts of their clients, you can see if they are managing any successful accounts. You can see how good the tweets are, and see how fast their client’s accounts grow which is critical to your success.

Even if you don’t understand social media…
Even if you don’t know anything about social media, if you have common sense and take good notes, you can easily distinguish between responsible, knowledgeable teams and idiots — and there are a lot of idiots out there. Sometimes you get a smart manager who hires workers who can’t think which is another issue. Just because the manager is good, doesn’t guarantee that the workers will be. If you ask teams the questions I indicated above, you can compare answers. See which teams give you actual information, and which teams just tell you that it depends, or that it is difficult to say, or that they would need to look into it after they made you wait two weeks just to have a meeting with someone. Wrong answer!

It is generally good to try companies out for a few months on low. Don’t give them too much work. Give them enough to see how it is in real life working with them. After you make contact with a few dozen companies, pick two to try out, and if one doesn’t work out, try others. You will not find the perfect company on the first attempt, so expect that the shopping around process could last for years, and become complacent to that reality.

Be wary of contracts
When you are trying someone out, you don’t know if you will like them and you don’t know how good their work will be. Even if their work is good, they could lose their star employee and then it will all go downhill. Try to avoid large contracts. If your company insists on a contract, keep it as short and as small as possible. It is easy to get taken for a ride with a contract. The contract guarantees how much money you give them, but does it guarantee how much results you will get? I strongly suggest putting very detailed and well thought out results in the contract if they insist on a contract. You might not be able to get them to sign it, but at least the contract will be beneficial in some way to you instead of purely for them. In the long run you will be forced to sign contracts. Just shop around very carefully before you sign anything, and keep it as small as possible in the beginning, even if that means going overseas!