Tampa Web Design & SEO Blog By Group 5 Web » Social Networking

Social Media… Fad or Revolution?

Lisa — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:47:20 +0000

Hm. And that is all I have to say about that.

Secrets to Growing Twitter Followers

Lisa — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:42:56 +0000

This is the subject of many a spammy autofollow sleazebag, I know. But there is no point in Tweeting if nobody’s reading. Relationships are what it’s all about, and that starts with following and being followed.
Quantity is important, but so is quality. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can have both.

You can have quality interactions with only so many people, and after that what you have is audience to broadcast to. If that many people want to hear what you say, good for them (and good for you, too).
Use Mr. Tweet to find other people on Twitter in your marketing niche and follow them. Many will follow you back, and they’re relevant to you and your existing followers.

Engage in conversations with top tweeters. Top tweeters are people who tweet a lot and who also have a lot of followers. The more followers a person has, the more likely those followers are to notice you, and the more likely they are to follow you.
Ask your followers to recommend you to their followers. This one takes a little guts, but if you know the other person well enough, there’s nothing wrong with it. Most people are happy to do this for you, they just didn’t think of it. You can do this via reciprocal arrangement through DMs.
Ask your blog readers to follow you on Twitter. And along the same lines, put a widget on your blog that has your latest tweets and/or the count of your Twitter followers.
Put a link to your Twitter profile page in the biography you include when you submit guest posts to other blogs (which means you should be guest-posting on other blogs).
Leave comments on blogs that let you include your twitter name, such as TwiTip by ProBlogger Darren Rowse.
Sign up for TweetBeep, a service similar to Google Alerts, but for tweets. This will help you go where the conversations are happening that you’re interested in. Engaging with others will get you more followers.

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To Blog, or not to Blog

Lisa — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:55:23 +0000

Blogging is fun. Blogging is informative. Blogging can make you cash. A blog is also the foundation of a successful Social Marketing campaign.

The best way I can define a blog is that it is like an online column in the newspaper. It is primarily one person who is an expert about certain subject reporting information or ideas on a regular basis. There is also the option for people to register to comment on your blog.
The whole point of a blog is to be a resource for people who are interested in you, your product, or your service. Twitter and Facebook come in handy to let your target market know when you have added to your Blog.
Blogs can be on your website or away from your website. There are benefits to both. Blogging away from your website creates links to your website, which is always a plus. But if I had my druthers, I’d create a blog on my website. Blogs are constantly changing, constantly growing, and if that is on your website, it is instant Google Juice.
Another option is using a custom Wordpress Blog as a site. It is a great idea if you are a startup on a small budget and have a lot to offer your target audience.
We like to use Wordpress blog platforms and recommend the following things:
Use your own URL and have it hosted away from Wordpress- You want the content in your blog to be yours. Also if you have our blog hosted you can download plug ins for SEO, Paypal, calendars, shopping carts, and just about any application you can think of.
Do your keyword research and use those words- It is also a great idea to add data like Meta descriptions, Page titles and keywords to every post. You can do this by downloading the Platinum SEO pack.
Add Twitter Tools and Publish to Facebook plug ins to automatically broadcast to your friends, fans and followers. You may want to deactivate the Facebook plug in while you are editing or making a lot of posts, since it updates with every edit, takes you straight to Facebook and leaves you there.
For more info on how we can help you set up a blog, visit Group 5’s page Get a Customized Wordpress Blog.

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Twitter Search Puts You in Control

Lisa — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:48:25 +0000

Twitter Search is a quick, effective way to find out who is talking about what you are interested in, and get followers that will Tweet about what you want to hear about. This leads to followers that bring value.

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Twitter Lingo

Lisa — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:56:27 +0000

Twitter, tweet, twat, WHAT? If you’re going to use Twitter successfully, you need to know the lingo.

Autofollow – Automatically following other users who follow you. This is a setting in Twitter that is usually not a good idea. Most people that autofollow are spammers.
Block – If you don’t want to ever see anything another Twitter user says, you can block them. You have control. Don’t let people spam or offend you.
Direct Message/DM – Private messages sent to other Twitter users who are following you, and whom you follow. You must be mutual followers to DM. To DM, start the message “@username”.
Follow/Followers/Following – When you want to read what another Twitter user posts, you follow that user. Your followers are all the people who are interested in what you have to say and in interacting with you on Twitter. When you are logged into the service, you can follow others with the click on a button.
Hashtags – Hashtags are a keywords prefaced with a “#” sign. If I tweeted about SEO, for example, I might put #seo in the tweet. There are services online which scan for these and people can also search on them and see all the tweets that contain a particular hashtag (the # is also called a hash sign).
OH – An abbreviation for “overheard” followed by something funny or entertaining which the tweeter overheard someone say.
Reply – A tweet that is a public message to another Twitter user. These tweets begin with @username.
Retweet/RT – Copying another Twitter user’s tweet and adding the letters RT plus their Twitter username. This allows you to spread great tweets by others and credit them.
Tweeple/Tweeps – Tweeple is a combination o twitter and people, meaning twitter followers. Tweeps is a similar combination of twitter and peeps (already slang for people).
Tweet/Tweeting – What you call a post on Twitter. Tweeting is what you’re doing when you’re writing posts on Twitter (some people say “twittering” instead).
Twit – A non-pejorative name for a Twitter user (or at least used tongue-in-cheek).
Twittering/Twitting – Another way to say you’re creating posts on Twitter (it means the same as tweeting).
Twoosh – A tweet that uses exactly 140 characters.
URL Shortener – A URL is a web page address. Because of the character limit in Twitter, long URLs would destroy any chance of sending a link to your followers along with a message. A URL shortener service redirects your long URL to a much shorter one that goes to the exact same address, saving space. Twitter does this automatically with URLs that you type or paste into the message window, provided that even with the URL, the message is still less than 140 characters.

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Set Up your Twitter Account for Maximum Effectiveness

Lisa — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:53:37 +0000

Let’s assume you can figure out the sign-up process in a logistical sense. What I’m talking about here is how to do it for the greatest effectiveness in marketing your business.
• Select the shortest name you can think of that describes you- That leaves more characters for Tweeting and Re tweeting
• Keep your name simple- No underscores or funny symbols to confuse your followers
• Use your real name- rather than the name of your business. Even though links on your Twitter profile page don’t pass PageRank for SEO purposes, your Twitter profile page still stands a good chance of ranking highly for your name, so use your real name as your Twitter name if you can. Nobody wants to interact with a corporate entity. They want to talk to people.
• Set your Twitter account settings so that you receive email notifications about follows and direct messages. You may want to turn this off later, but it’s a good idea in the beginning so you know what’s going on and can follow and respond to people.
• Set up your mobile phone/device to use Twitter if you are so inclined (best if you have a QWERTY keypad on your device, like a BlackBerry). Keep in mind that you select which followers you want to receive mobile updates from.
• Upload a decent-sized nice picture of your smiling face. On Twitter, you want to be a person first, and a business second. People are more likely to trust a person that a business.
• Customize your Twitter profile by choosing the same colors as your blog for branding consistency. You can get a fancy Twitter background image, too, if you want.
• Create a Twitter welcome page on your blog (hide it from your blog’s normal navigation). Use this Twitter welcome page as the URL you put in your Twitter profile.
• Your Twitter bio should be short, but rich in the top keywords for your business. Also be sure to include something personal.

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Getting Started With Twitter

Lisa — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:17:08 +0000

The key to Twitter effectiveness is controlling your followers and who you follow, and selecting the updates that you want to receive and when. You can block people, and control whether or not the updates they send are sent to your mobile device.
Twitter, like any tool. Is not about what it does. It is about what you do with it.
Explaining and defining the value of Twitter varies from case to case. My friend who is a Doctor of Oriental medicine has a following of doctors and medical professionals. She blogs about case studies, advances in herb logy, and successes from dual treatment of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western medicine. When she blogs, she Tweets about her Blog. The medical professionals that are interested in reading about the case study then know that she has written and check out her blog. It’s an effective way for her to stay in front of her target audience.
So how did she find those followers? She started by creating her profile using key words about her practice. The she used the search window to find other health care professionals tweeting about medical issues, or asking for alternative medicine advice. Then she followed them. They noticed her following them, checked out her blog, and most of them followed her because she wrote about things that were relevant to their practices. Soon she was in direct contact with Chiropractors, Health Practitioners like massage therapists, and Western Medical Doctors who were open to Traditional Chinese Medicine.
The result? They started to refer patients to her and her practice grew. And the patients that were sent were long term patients that she was successful with.
An effective, highly optimized blog is the foundation of any Twitter or Social Media campaign. For help on setting up a blog, customizing and optimizing it, visit http://www.group5web.com/pricing/get-a-blog.

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Taking the Clutter Out of Twitter

Lisa — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:46:37 +0000

Twitter is an amazingly easy way to inform a group of people about something or inspire them to take action. The concept is micro-blogging, sending a 140 character or fewer messages to followers to get them to check out your blog, take notice of an event, or just tell them what you are doing. The beautiful thing about Twitter is that if you look at all the tweets out there and organize them, it is a snapshot of our society. However, like all forms of Media, it can become an unwelcome distraction and a waste of time.

If you go to your home page in Twitter, you will see trends on the right side- this lists the most used words in Tweets so you can immediately see what everybody is talking about.

Another cool thing is the search function box. If you want to hear the latest Michael Jackson jokes, you can search for that and see all the Tweets at once that contain that word.

Hash tags are another way of making sure the people who want to see your Tweet can find it. For instance, one of the top trends today is #musicmonday. If I search #musicmonday, all the Tweets about #musicmonday are displayed, and I can view them all. The Tweeters simply start the tweet with the hash tag to ensure that the tweet can be searched for.

Twitter comments need to be either educational or funny. I have quit following anyone on Twitter that tweets every hour about a fly on their computer screen.

To help anyone who might be overusing Twitter, I have put together some examples of “bad” and “good” tweets.

Bad: “Stuck in traffic AGAIN, and this guy gave me the finger.”
Good: “Watch out for the Bayside Bridge. Dump Truck overturned.”
The first one is simply a complaint that happens to a vast majority of us on a daily basis. The second one has something in the comment that people in that area can use.

Bad: “It’s raining here and I’m watching the rain”
Good: “In the eye of the hurricane now here in Dallas, waiting for part two.”

The first one here is someone telling all their followers that it is raining. (Yawn) The second is giving an update on a natural disaster.

Bad: “Ahhh… I have a flat tire.”
Good: “So, I was driving down 9^th St and I ran over a hoe. Seriously. There was a hoe in the middle of the road. A garden hoe.”

Are you catching on to this, or do I need to explain that one?

When Tweeting, consider our target audience and what they want to hear, not just what you want to say.

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