Tag Archives: Twitter

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 Blog Writing Strategies, Keyword, Mute function on Twitter, Social Media, Social Media Campaigns, Social Media Platforms, Social Meida Marketing, Twitter | 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/

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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/

What is the growth rate of your social media profile?

April 3, 2015 by 123outsource

Categories: Social Media | Tagged Facebook, Googleplus, Growth rates on social media, Social Media, Twitter | Leave a comment

Social media is here to stay and is expanding its reach daily. In a few years, marketers may devote double the resources to professional social media accounts. But, what does the future look like for you?

We all spend time working on our social media accounts. Some of us have more followers than others. But, my question is, how fast do your accounts grow?

Google+
My Google Plus account only grows when I follow others. I publish popular industry specific content mixed with beautiful pictures and content of more general interest. We get at least fifty interactions per day, but no growth from the content no matter how popular it is. It seems that there are only two ways to grow a Google+ account. You have to have a fan base already that finds you because you have a G+ icon on your main site. Or, you follow lots of people and they follow you back. Even Guy Kawasaki who has over six million followers on G+ has a growth rate of less than 1% per month and he gets his content shared hundreds of times per day!

Twitter
A Twitter follower is only about 10% as potent for getting clicks as a G+ follower. However, Twitter is an easy medium for growth. Personally, I follow about 2000 new people per week on my main Twitter account and get a few hundred to follow me back. I can get 300 new followers per week without even trying. Additionally, if I publish twenty hot articles about my industry that I found on the web and get shared, I can get a lot more followers on top of that. I don’t have an exact number for that though. My estimate is that I might get 100 new Twitter followers if I get about 45 shares or favorites. Additionally, if I have ongoing discussions with other Twitterers, then Twitter introduces me to more people in their, “you might also like” section. If I used Twitter to the maximum, I could probably get around 800 new followers per week. On other mediums, this would be nearly impossible

Facebook
Facebook makes it easy to grow your presence with PPC for attracting new followers as well as PPC for sharing your articles. Both types of PPC have worked miracles for me. My facebook is currently growing at about 8% per month posting twice a day and using PPC. In three years, I might go from 9000 followers to 60,000.

Predicting Growth Rates
It is hard to predict growth rates on social media. The speed you are growing at now is not the same as the speed you will be growing at in a few years. You might reach a saturation point in attracting your relevant audience at a particular point, and then experience a slow down in growth. Or, your medium could stop growing which will affect your growth. Additionally, social media mediums could change their algorithm for how helpful they are in promoting your profile, or change their advertising rates or offerings.

How I see my future using G+
However, in my long run, I see getting a lot of clicks from Google+ since I am gaining a lot of followers through a very labor intensive practice of following and unfollowing. However, I don’t see much growth happening after I stop doing my manual promotion. Exponential growth doesn’t seem likely. I hope I’m wrong and that I am given the opportunity to grow into the millions.

Twitter – my future
Twitter makes it hard to get any serious amount of clicks unless you have 50,000+ followers. But, the good news is that in a few years, I see myself having that many followers. Additionally, I follow other large accounts that have grown a lot. One of the social media accounts I follow grew from around 60,000 to 100,000 in the last two years. Additionally, an account of general interest that I follow went from 400,000 to 550,000 in the last several years. These two accounts post regularly and have experienced growth rates of about 25-30% per year which is excellent and gives me hope. At the rate they are going they will be in the millions in a few years.

Facebook in the future
Right now I have 9000 Facebook followers on my Notary Facebook. I have different accounts for the different sites I manage, but the Notary Facebook is the most dynamic since we have such good followers. We’re growing at 8% per month. Since most of our followers are Realtors, and Mortgage Bankers, we might run out of potential followers after we hit 50,000, but it is looking like we’ll get to 50,000 in three years. We’re already getting 3000 or more clicks per month from Facebook, so it will be a waterfall of clicks in three years!

What about your future?
It is hard to predict which social media medium will do best in your future. So compare a few, and then really focus on the one that gives you some serious results. You need to track your analytics yourself because your individual situation si unique and not like mine or anyone elses.

Twitter vs. Google+, who delivers more clicks per 1000 followers?

February 8, 2015 by 123outsource

Categories: Social Media | Tagged Blog Articles, Googleplus, Social Media Test, Twitter, Twitter Account | Leave a comment

The Social Media Test
I just did a small test. I tested five of my most popular blog articles on Twitter and Google+. I have two Twitter accounts relevant to outsourcing with a total of about 12,000 followers. I have three Google+ accounts related to business and outsourcing that have a total of about 9000 followers or people who I am following. These five blog articles were on a variety of interesting topics relating to programming, social media, and general outsourcing business. The result was that we got one click on Google+ for every 2250 followers, while on Twitter we got only one click for every 6000 followers. I realize that if I had published different posts, or at different times, the results could have been a lot different.

Analysis
The next piece of information that I noticed was that the reading times for Google+ on these test postings was close to eight minutes, while the Twitter clicks were only a few seconds. I compared this data to average data for both accounts and learned that my average click from my outsourcing Twitter account was a little over one minute, while the outsourcing Google+ account gave me clicks with reading times around two and a half minutes. I get three times as many clicks per follower/followee on Google+ and with double the average reading time. I interpret this information to mean that a follower on Google plus is roughly six times as valuable as a Twitter follower.

However, I got more favorites and shares on my Twitter account. I think that if I did a serious analysis, I should test about twenty posts over a period of several days. This test is just a rough test to get a rough idea of how the various networks compare. My main issue is that I have noticed that on Google+, it is sometimes the case, that a particular post will get a huge volume of traffic, and then on another day, a different post will not. It could be that the Google+ network shows your posts to more people if you have posted less on a particular day. But, if you post too much, that they consider you to be overusing the network, and are not as generous with you. Additionally, if you post too much from the same URL in a particular day, it is possible that Google+ might not light this.

What can you do?
You might be confused about which social network to choose. It is a lot easier and faster to accumulate followers on Twitter. In the long run, it is harder to know which network is better. But, you can try Google Plus, and see what happens. Twitter is a great network to promote average content and still get shares. Google+ seems to be better for promoting your absolute top 1% of your content, and posts with a breathtaking or inspiring vertical photo. Google+ seems to reward the larger accounts. So, if you can get your account to the point where it has 5000+ followers, your experience might get a lot easier than what beginners experience. It is worth a try in any case.

What else should you know?
The fastest way to create the necessary buzz for your post to be shown on Google+ is to post on relevant communities. Sometimes a post can go viral overnight. Twitter doesn’t allow you to do this. It might be best to use Google Plus for what it is best for — communities! Personally, I am a regular on Nature Photo communities, Programming, and Social Media communities, all of which are large.

In any case
Good luck!

It’s those little quirky things you say on social media.

January 4, 2015 by 123outsource

Categories: Social Media | Tagged Social Media, Socialmedia, Twitter | Leave a comment

Many of us social media, and we all use it our own way. Twitter wants us to interact in meaningful ways. They would like Twitter to replace the telephone one day. Of course that will never happen because Facebook has already replaced the telephone, email, and mental telepathy. But, if you want to get more followers on Twitter, you have to please the Twitter gods. They like it when you interact.

Most people write incomplete opinions or one word replies to photos or articles. The key to using Twitter effectively is gaining people’s attention and getting them to like, retweet or comment on your comment. So, what are the secrets.

1. Provide a context in your comment. Sometimes those reading your feed will have no idea what you are talking about unless they click on the original post. That is why it sometimes pay to write a:

RE: Thais in #space
Do they have #Thai massage up there? Make sure the massage #oil doesn’t float around!
#ttot #travel

2. The RE: helps people understand the context, so they will understand the meaning behind your comment or joke. But, it helps to be quirky or funny. You will gain more on Twitter by being selective about what you comment on. Wait for some post that you really have something meaningful to say. And work at your response. You might go through a few versions of a possible response until you find one that fits and is catchy.

3. Tags help your comment get seen on feeds. If you use some popular and contextually relevant tags, you could double or triple the quantity of people who will see your comment.

If your comments get good interactions, Twitter will introduce more followers to you. So, it pays to be thoughtful, interesting and quirky. Sometimes dumb questions that are so dumb that they are funny do the trick.

RE: Mushrooms known to cure cancer
I had a mushroom w/a friend yesterday. Does that mean I won’t get cancer?

Comments that are so dumb, that they are funny can be very popular with Americans. After all, the movie Dumb and Dumber(er) did well here. So, will your lame jokes, especially if you use the tag #lamejoke. So, good luck on Twitter, and may the Twitter gods be with you!

9 ways to assess the value of your Twitter account or service provider

August 1, 2014 by 123outsource

Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Tagged Active Followers, Site Analytics, Social Media, Total Number of Followers, Twitter, Twitter Account, Twitter Profile | Leave a comment

Have you ever hired someone to do social media for you? Have people offered to do social media for you? Yes, it’s important, and yes it can help your business, but only if you know what you are doing and hire someone who is good. Otherwise, it can be a complete waste of tens of thousands of dollars or lakhs!

Some people use social media to get new customers. Others use it for the SEO optimization benefits. I use it for both and calculate its value based on any type of benefit I get.

But, most people are not too sophisticated in their use of social media. It is a common conception that having lots of followers is a good thing. I heard one guy complain that his Facebook profile had 200,000 followers but that his messages were not getting heard. Only the Pay-per-click strings he posted got any play. The fact is that there are too many people following too many people, and your message will get lost in the shuffle unless people are really paying attention to you.

Here are how I asses a twitter account.
(1) Total number of followers.
I don’t attach too much weight to this number unless I know the approximate value of the average member

(2) Total number of relevant followers
Many people’s followers are not even human. They are robots. Many other followers are just dormant and don’t respond to anything. A follower in your industry has more value to you than someone who follows you for no apparent reason. If you are in the logging industry and someone follows you who is not in logging, and doesn’t purchase the services of loggers, they might not be so relevant. On the other hand, if you have a travel Twitter account, and someone called Osaka highlights follows you, they would be relevant even though they didn’t use the word “travel” in their profile introduction.

(3) Total number of active followers
A relevant follower is as useless as an irrelevant follower if they just sit there collecting cyber-dust. Google will give you better placement on your site if you are getting retweeted, and if people are responding to your posts and making dialogues with you. If your followers do nothing, then they have no value. On the other hand, if you have a handful of dream come true followers who retweet you regularly, favorite you, put you on lists, and interact with you, you are in business. I am luck because I have several accounts that are not even following me that retweet me multiple times per day!

(4) Total number of retweets
If you get retweeted, that is good, but how many times does it happen in a 30 day period? That is an analytic in my book.

(5) How many accounts retweeted you at least once
If you get retweeted, but it is always by the same people, that is not a bad thing, but it is more interesting to see how many individual accounts retweeted you.

(6) The reach of your retweets.
Reach is a marketing term used a lot in internet marketing. Your reach is how many humans your advertisement reached. If they saw, it (and ignored it,) you still reached them. If you document all of the retweets you got in one column, and then calculate how many followers each of those retweets reached, then you have another analytic. If Sam and Fiona retweeted you — Sam has 10 followers, but Fiona has 5000 followers, then the reach of your retweets was 5010 followers. Whether your reach was well targeted or not is yet another layer of the analytical onion, so to speak!

(7) Incoming interactions
It is easy to post on Twitter. Some post really profound and fascinating content while most people post pure rubbish, or “Twitter Litter.” Anyone can tweet, but how many people can get people to write comments to them. And, how many people can get people to write intelligent and/or funny comments? Not so many. A lot of your skill as a Twitterer is how well you write commentary on other people’s tweets. You have to first select what to comment on. I generally will comment on less than 2% of very targeted tweets. Then, I’ll try to come up with a philosophical twist or a satirical angle on what they said, to make life interesting!

(8) Do any of your clients say they found you on Twitter?

(9) Have your site analytics for your main site gone up after you had major activity on your Twitter account? My rule of cyber-thumb is that if your Twitter or blog has a peak of extra activity, that activity (assuming that it is quality activity) will show up on your site stats roughly 20 days later. I call it the 20 day rule.

There is more to Twitter to what I mentioned. But, if you talk to the people who manage your account, ask them about these metrics, ask them what hashtags they are using, and look at your Google analytics stats, you can learn a lot! You might learn that it is time to fire someone as well if you learn too much from these metrics!

How many retweets do you need to get a new follower on Twitter?

July 15, 2014 by 123outsource

Categories: Analytics, Popular on Twitter, Semi-Popular | Tagged Retweet, Retweeted, Twitter, Twitter Accounts, Twitter Analytics | Leave a comment

On my notary twitter, we have accumulated more than 8000 followers. They seem to be very passive. We get some clicks on our links, but not that many. We get a handful of retweets per day, but nothing amazing. I figured if the number of followers kept growing, that our retweets might grow too. It sort of works that way, but not exactly.

Passive growth is anyone’s dream in social media. Imagine creating a Twitter or Linked In account that just grows on its own? Our Notary Linked In actually does just grow on its own and the discussions on it are fantastic too! What I learned from my new travel Twitter account, is that retweets only help you if you get a lot of them.

Our Notary Twitter gets one to eight retweets per day. We can’t measure how that helps us since we are doing PPC advertising and a lot of interaction. But, on my travel Twitter account which is new, we are not interacting with existing members. We are just getting new members, and there is no PPC. We follow others, interact, and retweet. There is a lot of activity on the account, but since there is no PPC, it is easier to guestimate the realities of the retweets.

On my travel Twitter we get retweeted generally 20 to 40 times per day. That is a lot of retweets. Our growth rate is 10-20 people per day. The growth comes partly from the retweets, but more from the following, retweeting, and interacting. I would estimate that we might get about four new followers per day from the thirty average retweets per day. But, it is more complicated than that. The size of the accounts that retweet you matters too. If you get retweeted by someone with ten followers, it really doesn’t help. But, if someone with half a million followers retweets you, then you are in business.

I actually did get a comment retweeted by a guy with 400,000 followers. I was curious to see if that would help. We got a generous amount of new followers during the following twenty-four hours, but not higher than we usually get in a way that I would measure.

My official guess, based on experience, is that — if you get retweeted in a way that reaches 15,000 Twitter accounts, you might get a single new follower. If what I call a “weak interaction” gets retweeted, you might need 50,000 people to get it in order to get a single follower. The quality of the tweet, and the relevance of the followers factor into the equation. Basically, to sum it up, if you want your Twitter account to grow from retweets, you had better get a ton of them daily.

I make it a practice to follow only those who either follow me, have top notch content, or those who retweet others regularly. If they retweet others, they are likely to retweet me, and that is exactly what is happening!

Good good, analytics are confusing!

You might also like:

Twitter analytics — click rates per 100,000 impressions
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/11/15/doing-some-twitter-analytics-click-rates-per-100000-impressions/

Learning to profile the accounts you follow on Twitter can triple your growth
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/07/12/learning-to-profile-the-accounts-you-follow-on-twitter-can-triple-your-growth/

9 ways to assess the quality of your Twitter account and/or social media agency
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2014/08/01/9-ways-to-assess-the-value-of-your-twitter-account-or-service-provider/

Is it better to promote your Twitter account manually or with PPC?

July 11, 2014 by 123outsource

Categories: Social Media | Tagged Paying per interaction, Promoting Your Twitter Account, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter PPC | Leave a comment

Is it better to promote your Twitter account manually or with PPC?

Although there are benefits to any type of Twitter promotion, each type of promotion has its advantages.

Manual promotion has its advantages

(1) See who the players are in your industry
(2) See which articles & pics get retweeted more!
(3) Hand pick you want to follow!

Promoting your Twitter manually allows you to see who the players are in your industry. You get to see what they tweet about and how popular their tweets are relative to other tweets in their account and relative to others in the industry. You will quickly notice that certain topics generate more interest than others. It is complicated since some twitter accounts might have millions of followers and others have only hundreds, so judge them on the amount of interest they generate relative to their size.

The other advantage of manual Twitter growth is that you can pick and choose who you want to follow, and chances are, if they are relevant, many of them will follow you back. I like to choose followers who tweet:

(1) Interesting information relevant to my industry
(2) Who retweet others regularly
(3) Who interact with others

If you have lots of followers, but those followers are what I call, “dormant,” then those followers don’t do you any good. Google’s algorithm for promoting your site in search results gives rewards to those who get “incoming interactions” and retweets. Anyone can have a million robot followers, but can anyone get a dozen or more responses to most of their posts?

Don’t overlook PPC
If you get into pay-per-click promotion on Twitter, you might experience some fast growth, but here are some factors to think about.

Do you have a blog?
If you don’t have a blog, then you can’t promote your blog posts on PPC. Promoting a blog is a great way to get regular visitors to your site, and will earn you some huge optimization points on Google. If you don’t blog now, it’s time to start, and hopefully become an expert at the topic.

What is a follower worth to you?
You need to do a rough estimate as to what a single follower is worth to you. You need to see how having followers creates an increase in your client base somehow, or adds to your overall search engine traffic and ranking. Personally, I get very few new clients from Twitter, but it helps tremendously with Google which is why I invest thousands per month in my six Twitter accounts. For my main Twitter account which is a Notary Twitter, I estimate that a follower is worth about $4. So, when I use PPC, I pay significantly less than $4 for each new follower that I get.

The value of new followers can really vary
You never know if your new followers are going to stick around. Additionally, not all followers are worth the same amount. An active follower might be worth $1000 or more to you in the long run while dormant followers might be worth nothing to you.

Pay per follower or pay per interaction?
We use both programs on our Twitter promotions. I found that I get better mileage paying for each time someone clicks on my blog. It costs me only 55 cents, and for every several clicks, one of the people who clicks follows me on Twitter. I kill two birds with one stone! I get lots of blog traffic and lots of followers!

Promoting blogs on twitter
Keep in mind that merely tweeting your blog titles on twitter might not attract much traffic. I have a professional comedy writer work with me writing “Tweet titles” for popular blogs. We often will write over a dozen titles, test them all out, and see which ones are the most popular. You can get a much lower rate per click and many more clicks if you become an expert at how to write “Tweet titles.” I consider this the single most important skill that I have acquired in my two decades of doing business! Take it seriously, and become an expert!

Twitter Stock — a good idea?

February 20, 2014 by 123outsource

Categories: Social Media | Tagged Social Media, Social Media Landscape, Twitter | Leave a comment

I love Twitter. I am a tweetaholic if there is such a thing. My new Twitter and social media manager’s name is Arielle. I joke that if your Facebook does well it goes viral, but if your Twitter account grows like crazy it goes Arielle! (Aerial). But, take a look at their stock. Twitter has been losing money, and yet their stock went from $41 to about $60 in the last few months since their stock went public. I’m not saying that you won’t make money with Twitter stock, but it is gambling when you purchase a stock that is losing money with the hopes that it will grow out of control and turn a profit.

I think it is likely that Twitter will continue to grow and perhaps make huge profits. But, social media is very unstable and new with very little track record. The social media landscape changes so quickly, it is hard to predict if the big guys will be able to adapt to market changes. The big question is whether or not Twitter can sell advertising to large companies. They are doing this now, but can they make it profitable in the long run? This is very unclear.

I think Twitter could make it big, but it could get into bad financial trouble too, and your stock has a high chance of becoming worthless as well. Buying stock in social media is a gamble in general. I think that oil companies are much more stable as an investment these days. Low p/e ratios, and very stable business models. Just close your eyes when you ponder what they are doing to the environment.

If I were a bird, I would like Twitter stock, but I’m a human who drives a gas powered cars. I’ll stick to oil stocks for now!

Tweets:
(1) I am a tweetaholic if there is such a thing, but should I buy Twitter stock?
(2) I think Twitter stock could make it big, but could get into financial trouble too.

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Social Media Optimization: Checking the effectiveness of each of your campaigns

December 20, 2013 by 123outsource

Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Tagged Age Segment, Analytics, Facebook, Google+, Optimization, Social Media Campaigns, Social Media Optimization, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Twitter Campaign | Leave a comment

Social Media Optimization: Checking the effectiveness of each of your campaigns

It is a bit baffling these days with so many social media campaigns. Which ones should you use, and which ones do you understand? New ones come out every month too which adds to the complexity. Some are better for targeting younger folks, while Facebook is great for the 40-60 year old age segment. There are several analytics you need to understand when comparing social media venues.

(1) What is the cost of growing a particular campaign?
Do you spend three times the effort growing your Twitter campaign as your Facebook profile? Is your Stumbleupon or your Google+ a little faster to grow? Pay attention to how much effort goes into growing each type of campaign. On the other hand, if you really like a particular campaign, you will enjoy growing it which is another factor to consider.

(2) What types of results do you get after spending “x” amount of hours?
If you spend 100 hours on Twitter (did you count the hours?), how much gain did you get in your SEO? Can you measure that?

(3) What types of results did you get with $100 of pay-per-click on various mediums?
You can see how many clicks you got, and if there were any conversions that lead to traffic to your sales area in your site or actual purchases.

(4) How do you judge the quality of a click?
Not all clicks are created equal. Some lead to new followers, while others lead to sales. There are endless metrics you can use to compare click quality. If you are just starting out with a new network you can looks at: (a) How long each visitor spent on your site in seconds, (b) How many pages the average new visitor spent on your site. I learned that Facebook was better for one of my blogs while Twitter was better for another. So, there is no right answer. There are only answers that are right for specific situations. Also, consider which particular blog article you are promoting. Each different article will get different analytics, so get at least 40 clicks before you compare. Most new visitors will only skim your articles. Only a few will really read. The point here is to find out what percentage of your new followers will do some serious reading and clicking around.

(5) Sometimes the posts that did well on one network will do well on others
I noticed that some of the posts I had which did well on Google did well on Stumbleupon. We’ll see how that pans out in the long run. It is a little early to tell.

Good luck!

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Optimizing your Twitter PPC Campaign

December 10, 2013 by 123outsource

Categories: Of Interest, Social Media | Tagged Google Analytics, Per-Per-Click, PPC Campaign on Twitter, SEO Power, SEO Value, SEO Value of Having a Big Twitter, Twitter, Twitter PPC | Leave a comment

Optimizing your Twitter PPC Campaign

Many of us use Twitter, but how many of us use the pay-per-click program? It is a different animal. You have to be careful not to overspend, but also be careful about how your structure your adgroups. Twitter PPC has adgroups. You might put a bunch of different tweets in the same adgroup, or you could divide them. You can bid a different amount of cents for each adgroup. You can also bid for getting new followers. It is complicated.

My recommendations

(1) Keep separate adgroups for each tweet.
This might take more time. But, you need to see which tweets are getting clicked on, and at what price. If they are all bunched together, your google analytics will tell you which one is getting traffic — that is all you will know. If you raise the bid, then maybe the other ones will get traffic. It is complicated. If you keep your campaigns separate, then you can see the price breakdown for each tweet and see if it is worth it. You might get very cheap clicks on certain tweets which might do miracles for whatever those tweets link to. If a particular tweet doesn’t get many clicks, you can abandon promoting that particular tweet. My experience is that you should choose your tweets carefully before submitting them. Of the ones you think might do well, only 20% will actually do well. But, 20% is enough. As time goes on you can continue testing new tweets to see how they do.

(2) Paying for followers
It is hard to know what a follower is really worth. For each 1000-4000 followers, you might get a single click for each link you put in a tweet. That is not a good average. This is why you need huge volume to do well on Twitter. You also need really interesting content. Most Twitter followers are extremely dormant and are following so many people that they are not paying attention to any of them! You can start bidding low for followers and see how many you get. If you don’t get too many, then experiment bidding higher. Keep records of how you did at various levels. Stay at each price break for a week before going to the next level and keep very careful records with dates and times of price changes. Once you find your ideal price range that gives you good output without destroying your bank account, then stay there for a while.

A good PPC campaign on Twitter can give you a huge account in a year or two. Niche accounts might get 10,000 followers in that time while more general interest accounts could get a million. To get ahead in business, networking on Twitter is a powerful source of SEO power. The actual new visits to your site you get from Twitter is only the tip of the iceberg of what it is worth. The SEO value of having a big Twitter account tweeting links to critical pages on your site and blog is huge! Whether it is price effective or not is up to you to find out, but don’t underestimate the power of Twitter.

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How to optimize your Twitter campaign

December 7, 2013 by 123outsource

Categories: Of Interest, Social Media | Tagged Social Media Optimization, Social Media Strategy, Socialmedia, Twitter | Leave a comment

How to optimize your Twitter campaign

Twitter is an interesting beast. It is hard to tame, and hard to harness. But, some people have figured out how to use it optimally and almost effortlessly with great results.

SEO benefits of Twitter
I have learned that the actual new traffic we get from Twitter is negligible. However, the SEO benefits we get on Google derived from our use of Twitter is unbelievably good. Twitter as a tool should be used to link to your important pages on your site and blog. My experience that a link to each important page every four months is perfect. You basically get points with Google every time you post a link on Twitter, and then get even more points each time the link gets clicked on by someone other than you (they know if it’s you). If your Twitter account is large, you get points for having a link from a larger account. Twitter is powerful in optimization, so don’t underestimate its strength.

How to grow your Twitter the easy way
Twitter requires daily care just like a plant, or a pet. You have to water a plant regularly, otherwise it withers. You have to feed your pet and scratch its back and talk to it, otherwise your pet gets lonely. Twitter is just like this! The secret is to use the suggested other Twitter accounts on the left, and follow a few of them every day. Pick the more interesting and relevant ones.

(1) Follow new accounts every day, but don’t go overboard or the Twitter gods get mad. If you like over 1000 people in the same day you will get into trouble.
(2) Find all of the new people who followed you and say, “Thanks for following”. This is important because it engages not only the person who followed you, but is visible to those who frequent that person’s account — and those people might follow you too after they see your icon.

(3) Make thoughtful, interesting, and unique comments on the tweets of people who you follow. Those comments are visible to anyone visiting their page, and those visitors will retweet you and follow you if you are intelligent enough. This is a skill that requires daily refinement, so start today!
(4) Study what types of tweets other people respond to, and make more of them. Learn to do “profiling” or “segmenting” of types of tweets. Avoid downers and give relevant information, shockers, and entertaining information in your tweets.

(5) Retweet others, but don’t retweet the same account more than once in two weeks unless it is 200% relevant to your material. The purpose of retweeting is that it is a great way to get your icon seen. Retweeting general news issues, or things of general interest is a good idea.

(6) Your tweets should be a mixture of industry specific, social media, and current events / news. This is what the professional marketing managers use as a mixture. The exact percentage of the mix might vary from account to account. By social media, we mean interesting commentary that one of your Facebook friends might have made on Facebook or Twitter, etc. Don’t tweet boring stuff, but people love a cool quote — this is what the experts do. I tried this approach and got results from it.

(7) Filter your tweets. I might write 200 tweets and pick the best 80 if you want to keep your fans happy. It is about quality if you want to get retweeted and followed.

(8) Pay-per-click is not for everyone, but that is a fast way to get followers. We get 500 new followers per month on our notary twitter and that is a very tiny niche market. It took us four years to get 3500 people, now we can get double that in around one year — now that is speed. PPC is time efficient. Instead of spending lots of time following others and commenting on their posts, PPC gets you 10x the results in 10% of the time! If you have more money than time, use PPC.

It takes time!
Expect to spend 15 minutes a day on Twitter. Don’t waste time on it. Go through steps 1-7 daily. It should become a fast routine. If you are bored, then you can read through your entire inbox for three hours and make responses to 100 tweets that other people wrote. If you spend 15 minutes a day, you can realistically expect to get about 60 new followers per month if your tweets are any good. In a little over a year, you might have 1000. If you want to have results faster than that, you need to either spend an hour a day on Twitter, or use the PPC program.

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Active vs. Dormant followers on Twitter

September 27, 2013 by 123outsource

Categories: Analytics, Semi-Popular, Social Media | Tagged Dormant Followers, Google Analytics, Retweet, Retweet me, Twitter, Twitter Accounts | Leave a comment

Active vs. dormant followers on Twitter

I have five Twitter accounts and find them all to be very interesting. However, several are run by a manager who has a very definitive way of running her accounts. She targets users one by one who are relevant. This makes sense, but there is more that needs to be considered. After we have accumulated 3800 fans, only a handful of them interact with us or retweet us no matter how good our materials are.

I just started my own two Twitter accounts. Each one has a well defined audience. I do not target prospective users at all. I have a completely different way of attracting followers. One technique I use is to retweet from industry news, national news, and international news. That way I get interesting people to join my account. Those new folks might not be relevant to my niche, but they are the type that click the EXPAND link — which means that they are the type that retweet. You can not retweet without clicking the expand link. With my niche followers, even if they did retweet me, their followers are not in my niche, so the tweet would never go viral. However,

these followers who found me when I retweeted, are retweeters themselves, and they retweet me. My new Twitter accounts that have less than 100 followers are getting retweeted once per day which is more than I was getting with my old accounts after they hit 3000 followers. The only way to make it big on Twitter is to go viral, so attracting people who retweet is key. The next thing I do is to interact on large Twitter accounts. The relevancy and quality of the interaction determines whether I get retweeted or not. I use humor, and spend a lot of time refining how I convey my message. I’ll sum up my techniques below:

(1) Retweet from industry news, national, and international news. But, don’t retweet from each source more than once per week for maximum results. Remember, that retweeters are searching through those mediums looking for others who retweet — so they can FOLLOW them. Those retweeters are clicking the expand button on many tweets, so you only need to be on one per week.

(2) Interacting on large accounts, or relevant accounts. A small account in your niche is a place to interact regularly. But, large news sources or entertainers are good places to interact. By posting a really interesting response to a post they published — THEY will not retweet you, but their fans will. I get retweeted almost daily by this technique. You need to be very selective about what you respond to and how you respond. Humor works well, and insight works even better.

(3) Use crossover tweets? Tweet information that is industry specific for your niche, but ALSO is relatable to the public. I tweeted about cats who use google analytics. People loved this. It appealed to the laymen as well as hard core analytics guys! Crossover tweets get retweeted roughly 10x as much as a thoughtful industry specific tweet.

It is no crime to interact with people with mini-accounts of 100 people or less, but it is not a way to go viral. Those will end up being dormant followers who do nothing more than represent a number in your # of followers. Active followers can be caught through interacting and retweeting. Throw your herbal antibiotics away and go viral today!

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Tag Archives: Twitter

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