Social Media

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

5 Scientifically Proven Ways To Get More Followers [Infographic]

(via http://DanZarrella.com)


Friday, October 22nd, 2010

Creating a Social Media Content Schedule

In my last post I discussed four kinds of social media content that are generally successful on social media. In this post, I want to take your social media content implementation to the next level.

One of the emerging buzzwords in corporate social media is “content schedule.” This isn’t a new concept, neither is it particularly complicated. However, as companies venture deeper and deeper into social media’s broad territory, it is becoming more and more critical to have some kind of overarching framework from which individual channels are managed.

After all, when you’re talking about managing multiple social media channels, each with its own set of unique needs, requirements, and content, things can get overwhelming quickly and pretty soon channels start to go unwatched and unloved. Creating a content schedule helps with this, because it allows you to see in a discrete and orderly fashion what content is needed where.

It also allows you to see relationships between channels, like when you need to follow up a killer blog post with an equally killer tweet. So here you go: this is my system for coming up with a social media content strategy. As with pretty much anything I post here, there are a million ways to go about it. However, these are the things I’ve found to be the most effective to think about when creating a social media content schedule:

  1. Channels – First of all, think about where you want to manage your brand’s presence. With hundreds of social media channels available, you can’t manage a presence on all of them, nor would you want to, since your customers (both present and future) are probably only congregating on a few sites. The obvious channels to talk about here are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and MAYBE MySpace or LinkedIn. However, there are so many smaller niche networks, that you might find a great little gathering of perfect prospects on some obscure site. So how do you find them? There are a few ways, some more expensive than others. First, you could pay for a social media listening tool like Radian6 or Techrigy SM2. Just punch in your brand terms and see what pops up. Another (free) option is to look at referring sites in your site analytics. Keep an eye out for good amounts of traffic coming from social media sites. Finally, do a search on Google for one of your main keywords and in the left-hand column, select the “latest” option to see the latest real-time search results. That can let you know where conversations are taking place. Browse a few pages, get a feel for volume, and look for surprises (like a niche social network).
  2. Frequency – Decide how often you’re reasonably able to post to each channel. Be realistic, and then set a goal slightly below. Believe me, it’s easier to start small and realize that you have enough content to bump your frequency up than it is to start too fast and then realize that you’ve run out of things to say. When starting a blog, for example, I think having the goal to post just once a week is a great idea. It’s easy to expand that number if necessary, and you don’t feel as much pressure in the meantime. Sooner than later, you’ll get the hang of the blog thing and get some company-wide help (hopefully) and then you can bump the frequency up a notch or two without causing yourself to burn out.
  3. Content – This is the magic part of the calendar where you get to decide what gets posted where. While I’ve already written about types of content to post, you have to tailor that content to the various channels you’re calendaring. Also, here’s a tip for populating a content schedule quickly – come up with themes (hopefully pulled from either your business goals and needs or your SEO keywords, or both!) and then turn them into recurring features. For example, if you sell snowboards, on the first Tuesday of every month, you might write about the board of the month. That way, every first Tuesday, you know what you have to write about. This has the added benefit of building expectations with your readership. So keep an eye on which recurring features get no  comments and shares. Drop them and keep trying to fill the space with new ones that are more engaging. A little trial and error later, and you’ll have a killer lineup of recurring content that your readers are anxiously waiting to consume and share.
  4. Help – Once you know what your content needs are, you can start looking around within your company for people to help you create said content. Believe me, your life will be easier and your content more engaging if you can vary the source from whence it comes. If you’ve got a series on shoe design, find the biggest clothes horse you know and ask them to create some stuff. If they’re passionate about it, they should have no problem coming up with some content that speaks to other enthusiasts in an authentic way, and that’s the kind of content that gets shared and reshared.
  5. Flex, Rinse and Repeat – As with anything scheduled, your content plans will be thrown awry. People will miss deadlines, emergencies will crop up, and new ideas will occur. Don’t be afraid to adjust the schedule to accommodate them. That’s one of the gifts of working with social media; you have the ability to be incredibly flexible. If you find yourself making the same adjustments repeatedly, make it permanent. Just make sure that the schedule works, or you’ll stop using it and it will have been a colossal waste of time.

So that’s it. That’s my magic advice. Do you use a publishing schedule, and if so, what do you do to create it?


Thursday, October 14th, 2010

Four Kinds of Successful Social Media Content

Back when I was getting started in SEO, I quickly learned the adage “content is king,” meaning that creating high-quality content is the first and most essential element to good SEO. But while this idea is still debated in SEO circles, it’s a virtual certainty in social media. If you want to hold on to the attention of your audience, you have to have compelling content. So what constitutes compelling content? Here are some proven content ideas that perform well on social media:

  • New information – This includes breaking news, original research, and unique conclusions or ideas.
    • Ideas – Create a whitepaper. Share interesting statistics from your business. Think about what your audience finds interesting and provide unique insight about it.
  • Infographics – Interesting facts centered around a specific topic and represented graphically so as to make them easier to digest.
  • Humor – This is fairly obvious to describe, but more difficult to execute. Some of the
    • Ideas – Really the best advice I can give you is to look inside your organization and think about the funny stuff that happens inside the office. What do you laugh about around the water cooler? Try to adapt those ideas to your business. Your other option? Find the funniest coworkers you know and ask them to brainstorm together.
  • Contests – This takes some investment in both time and money, but it’s worth it when properly executed. Contests can range from a sweepstakes (Twitter retweet contests, Facebook “Like” contests) to actual contests (like photo contests, email essay contests, or other judged events).
    • Ideas – Think about your goals. Do you want more followers/fans? Run a sweepstakes where following/”liking” is a requirement. Want  engagement from current fans (and some user-generated content)? Run a photo/essay/video contests.

This is in no way a complete list. There are countless other methods and ideas, and some of the biggest successes in social media have come from outside the box. That said, social media is a science, and these are some proven avenues of success. What kinds of content have you found to be successful with your corporate social media?

Creating a Social Media Content Schedule

Monday, January 11th, 2010

5 Steps To Better Social Media ROI Measurement

One of the biggest issues corporate social media faces is the problem of explaining how much these channels are actually worth, in dollars. There are a lot of great resources when it comes to answering that question- this article from Mashable provides an excellent primer on how to get started with “the metric to end all metrics.” While much of ROI calculation is just straightforward math, it also requires a little creativity. Here are 5 steps to think about when you’re considering how to quantify your actual fiscal contribution.

  1. Make a list of which social media activities you regularly engage in. Do you answer product questions? Support requests? Recommend your product/service? Drop links to viral campaigns that drive visitors to your site? There are endless numbers of things you could be doing. You just need to catalog them.
  2. Think about how each of those items on the list impact the business. Do they result in sales? Positive press mentions? Lower churn? Make sure you have a positive business outcome for each action you take. If you can’t come up with a positive business result for some of your actions, consider not engaging in that activity.
  3. Take your activities and divide them into two categories- those that create new revenue, and those that create cost savings. For example, answering product questions instead of sending it to the sales team is a cost savings for the company, whereas driving traffic to a signup page via a blog article results in new revenue (hopefully).
  4. Figure out how to attach a dollar amount to each activity. When it comes to determining revenue generation, it’s fairly simple. First, use tracking links wherever possible (custom tracking links in conjunction with link shorteners, etc.). Second, keep a detailed timeline of your social media activities, so that you can measure increases in sales against the baseline. Coinciding increases can be connected with your campaigns (albeit somewhat circumstantially). When it comes to cost savings, things are a little bit more difficult. To better explain, I’ll demonstrate through my own experience. One of the activities I spend a lot of time doing is solving support issues via Twitter. To calculate the dollar savings of that activity, I talked to our support people and found out how long the average support call takes. Then I determined the median wage for a support tech. This gave me an approximate cost per call (a lot support managers will already know this number, you just have to ask). With that number, I could now demonstrate a cost savings for every request I took off of supports’ hands.
  5. Think outside the box. After examining the obvious ways that your activities generate revenue and cost-savings, look at other side benefits your activities generate. For example, if you’ve created some evangelists along the way and you observe one of them taking on support questions proactively, you could count each incident as additional cost savings (as per the last example). After all, if you hadn’t contacted that evangelist, odds are good that the customer would be talking to your support people instead. The same thing goes for purchase recommendations from evangelists.

So that’s my $.02 on the process that I go through when considering the financial impact of my corporate social media activities. What’s the process you use to determine the ROI for your your social media activities?


Friday, October 2nd, 2009

My SMCUV Corporate Social Media Presentation

Here are the slides from my SMCUV presentation last night. I had a great time talking about social media with Nate Bagley, Seth Jenks, and special guest Fred “Costa Vida Fred” Abroa. I hope you enjoy the slides, and feel free to leave questions in the comments!


Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Don’t Buy The Hat

I remember “Field of Dreams” pretty vividly from my childhood, possibly because it’s a good movie, but probably because I was creeped out by the ghosts. Either way, the phrase “If you build it, they will come” has kind of stuck with me. In fact, it stuck with me so much that when I started to work on my company’s social media strategy, I took that approach to all of them. I figured that I could use the same content on all the social media sites, and as long as we had a presence there, people would flock like the salmon of Capistrano. Turns out that Field of Dreams was full of crap, in this case (seems like a no-brainer now, but at the time, it was a revelation). Since then, I’ve come to realize several reasons why that approach failed.

Account For Your Audience

You see, each one of these social media sites has a slightly different value proposition for its users, and a one-size-fits-all strategy is ineffective. What’s good for Twitter is not necessarily great for Facebook. Facebook users are looking for something different than Twitter users, and YouTube users are definitely looking for something that can’t be found on Twitter. Basically, I’m just saying you have to account for your audience.

Create Unique Value

Another issue with the one-size-fits-all strategy is that if you’re providing the same stuff on all your channels, what’s the incentive for a user to follow you on Twitter, fan you on Facebook, and subcribe to your YouTube stream? None. It’s all the same. So what if, instead, you provide each platform with its very own tailor-made value proposition? What if you have videos that are exclusive to youTube, insider information that can only be gotten as a Facebook fan, and coupon codes that can only be found on Twitter? All of a sudden, you’ve created a very real value for each of your channels that will encourage customers to connect with your brand on each of them.

Signal, Not Noise

This may seem obvious, but I have to say it anyways. Make sure that the value you’re trying to provide really is valuable. Hopefully you know your business and your market well enough to know what your users would consider valuable. This could be as simple as understanding the humor of the group you’re trying to reach so you can make YouTube videos they would enjoy, or as complex as researching your target userbase in-depth and developing an app that ties into your product and addresses a major need your target userbase has.

So anyways, for future reference, unless you live in the Midwest, have a close friendship with James Earl Jones and you’re building a baseball website, the “If you build it” approach might not be for you. Trust me on this one.



All content © Copyright 2012 by NateKartchner.com.
Subscribe to RSS Feed – Posts or just Comments