ActiveRain Tutorials: September 2010

Today I am sharing part 2 of my series on Social Media Engagement vs. Sales. Last week I shared Six Steps to Converting Guests to Fans of Your Facebook Page. It covered several different issues that I have seen on various Facebook Pages over the past few months. This post is today is going to venture into the world of Twitter. Twitter is another great resource for growing your business online. Nowhere else on the web can you engage people and have so many conversations at once. But what I have found is that many have turned Twitter into their spam grounds. They set up accounts and try to garner as many followers as they can in the quickest means possible. The concept is that if they get thousands of followers they will have a giant net to share their products to and will in essence sell more things. But what I have found is that this is not the case.

When you build a twitter profile where there is no engagement, it results in a very low return on your investment. I am somewhat an open networker. I will accept anyone as a friend and give them a chance to show me they don't belong connected to me anymore. Yesterday I received an auto from a new follower from which I have been able to find 7 things that everyone should NOT do with their twitter account. The following points all came from one single account.

7 Ways to be Hated on Twitter.

1- The auto DM. When I first started on Twitter, I thought it was a good idea to send an Auto message to every new follower with information about me and a link to my site. In the beginning it was actually an effective tool to me as the first followers to my account were friends that I knew. But I learned quickly that spammers and others began to abuse this feature. I quickly disabled it and have since really started to notice the annoyance of users that use those type of services. Over to the right you can see an automated message from the account I recently followed. Their message sent said: "Thanks for following! I HATE SPAM! You won't get that from me. Maybe check out my blog of Twitter tips/tactics for marketers/networkers." My next action was to unfollow and block their account.

2. Creating Good First Impressions- If your first impression is trying to convince me you hate spam and don't do that through a spammed message, you have already lost me. A much more effective way to meet someone on Twitter is to listen to what they are saying and engage with them. Joining into a conversation is really easy to do on Twitter as people are constantly posting things wanting you to interact with them. When you see someone post something that you either have an interest in or a way of adding to the conversation, simply do that.

3. Stop Talking To Yourself! I try to spend more time listening & interacting with others on twitter than I do talking about myself or my business. I don't use a specific formula for this, I just try to keep the conversations more about others instead of me. When everything is all about you and nothing about your friends/followers, they will listen and follow along for a short while, but after a few days of all you and nothing about them they will move on and ignore you.

4. Mentioning Others Make You Human- When I look at your Twitter stream do I see you interacting & talking to others? Or is it littered with you spewing junk all over the place? If all I see is you spitting info without any interaction, it is a pretty quick indicator to me that you are someone that will be spamming my stream and also add zero value to me. Remember, you are coming into my stream of Twitter, it needs to be beneficial to me not you. When your stream shows that you will connect with me and do something valuable to me, I will want to pay attention to you.

5. Share Your Website- This one blew my mind yesterday in the spammers DM to me. He mentions that I should visit his blog for tips to help. But when I visited his profile, there was no link to a site. If you want to be helpful and give me advice, then you need to give me an avenue to travel to it. Just saying visit my blog or website won't cut it if there is no link to it. Your profile on Twitter is a powerful part of your Twitter Account. Adding that link takes only five seconds and helps you to look like less of a spammer.

6. What's Your Ratio? When I look at your profile, do I see you following thousands of people with a lot less following you back? When I see a profile like this, it screams that this is someone just trying to get more followers and isn't very interesting. If you share things that are relevant & engaging, people will want to follow you and you will have many more following you than who you are following. Because of spammers trying to capitalize on this by following more and more people, Twitter installed some guidelines. You can follow up to 2,000 people initially. Then you are only allowed to follow 10% more than those who are following you. So if you have 10,000 followers, you can only follow 11,000 at any time. As your number of followers grow, you can also follow more again.

7. Skip the Selling & Gimmicks- You have minimal characters on your profile to share what it is about. If you are taking that premium ad space to try and promote a gimmick or something you are selling, you will be turning people off. The profile yesterday started out fine by saying that they provide Twitter tips/tactics and Social Media marketing which can be helpful. But after that, they added a gimmick to try and get more exposure and followers by saying "I promote people w/10k+, RT for an add to daily RT list. I follow back!" When I saw this sentence I knew instantly that this person was someone I did not want to interact with anymore. Then, I visited their profile on Twitter.com to see what other junk I may find.

In their background image, they had added the following text:

The timeline and the blog linked above my bio have lots of information about how to turbo-charge Twitter and make money online through Twitter and social media in general. If you retweet my posts about my blog, I'll follow you, add you to my RT list, and give you a solo shoutout with lots of hashtags in it. I also add any users with 10,000+ followers that RT me to my RT list.

These type of gimmicks do nothing but remind me of MLM schemes of days before. Also, I don't believe there is any value that a spammer can add to me by spamming a tweet with my username and "lots of hashtags in it." Engagement is what makes Twitter and other social media platforms successful for your business. A great quote from John Maxwell comes to mind: If you are leading, but nobody is following, then you are just out taking a walk.

So, to keep yourself from becoming a disliked person on Twitter, please ignore the 7 practices listed above. Instead follow the habits of successful people on twitter like @lizstrauss and @chrisbrogan and you will see rewards come your way. I promise!

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

photo credit

Today I decided to start another mini series here on the 210 blog. It was birthed out of cleaning out my Page Suggestions box on my Facebook Profile. You know what I mean, all those wonderful requests you get to join pages like "My Dog is Cuter than Yours" & "Save the endangered Grass." In addition to the silly requests, you also get invited daily to join pages of your friends & connections on Facebook. This post talks about ways to get more people converted to liking your page & participating on it.

Before I share what can help increase the number of people joining your Facebook Page, let me first share my requirements to click like and join your page. If your page can accomplish any one of the following things, it stands a good chance I will like it. It has to do one of these:

1. Engage me on a topic I am interested in.
2. Give some sort of information that can be helpful to me.
3. Be involved with a charity/cause topic that interests me.
4. Be different & unique with what they offer that captures my attention.
5. Be the page of a good friend who I enjoy helping and am interested in what they might say..

So as I was clearing out the 428 invitations to join pages, I decided it was time to turn it into a blog post as I found several pages (about 419) that didn't follow any of these rules. Here are 6 ways to convert guests to fans of your Facebook Page.

Engage Me at the Title

The first thing that makes me not want to join a page is the title. If you want to attract more people to your page and get them interested in what is happening there, you need to have a great title. You need to pick this wisely in the beginning because once you set the page title, you can never change it. We work with a lot of clients in the real estate industry and when they go to set up pages, they normally set the title to something like the one to the right. I hid all this person's incriminating info to protect their identity. Trust me when I say they are not alone with creating a page title that is simply, their name, Realtor. In this case, they didn't even use REALTOR® properly. But that is a whole other conversation. When you are trying to get your friends on Facebook and all of their friends to join your Facebook Page, you need to start with an interesting title. The only people that will be joining this page are those that are friends of this agent. As you can see, so far the page only has 1 fan. If you make the page more about an area of interest, a specific topic or idea, people will be more willing to join. When the title sounds like a sales pitch, or business card, people are not as quick to join and participate.

Ask ME Questions

One of the best ways to get interaction & people talking about your Facebook page is to ask questions that people can't resist answering. For example, one of the pages I created has over 90% of the posts I place just being questions. The interaction level on this page is really good and people love to find out more information not just from me. I can go to this page once every 3-4 days and ask a simple question and the fans of the page give enough answers helping the group find new & interesting things without me having to do all the leg work. This page has grown on it's own to over 650 fans and I have done hardly anything to accomplish this. I might spend a total of 10 minutes per week on the page. Too many times do I see Pages turned into just another aspect of broadcasting all the info you have on your website which can be helpful, but nobody wants to just read all about you unless you are an internationally known brand or celebrity.

Include Posts by Others In Your Feed

One of the simplest things you can do on your Facebook Page is change the settings as to what shows up in your feed. The default is always set to just the things said by the page. In a matter of seconds you can change that to show what the page & the fans of it are saying on it. I think this is a major component to whether people feel important on the page. Think about this a moment: What is the best type of advertising for a business? Word of mouth from happy clients! If you hide the fans that are saying great things about your business, you are overlooking a very powerful source of marketing. Change the settings to show both, and then monitor what is said. I will give you a fair warning that you may get spammed by this, which seems to be taking place more often lately. The one comment I get when I mention changing to this option with a client is "what if someone posts something negative about us?" You do run the risk of something like this happening whether it is true or not. But, this is also a great way to grow your business by how you handle these types of situations. I have seen way too many companies handle it incorrectly, but if you can address the complaints timely and properly, it shows that your business is paying attention & cares what your clients think. Doing this type of customer service can take a business from good to excellent over night.

Respond! Respond!

Replying to what people say on your Facebook page is HUGE. Every time a fan writes something on your wall, you get free advertising as it shows up on their wall activity. So, if that person leaves 5 comments, there are 5 links back to your page promoting it to their friends. When the friends see that, they become curious and will come visit the page too. You also make the fans of the page feel important when they are receiving direct contact from you. A good friend of mine, Mike Mueller calls this comment tennis. Whenever someone comments on his page, he makes sure to always go back and be the last commenter on anything. This can become a little time consuming if your page starts to take off, but the rewards from doing so can be great. If your page grows so large that you feel you are spending too much time doing this, then add an additional admin to the page to help you monitor/respond to everyone.

Be More Vain

Facebook introduced the use of vanity URL's several months back and so many still are unaware of them. What's a vanity URL? Well, it a simpler way to tell people to get to your new page. Instead of trying to tell someone to visit our Facebook Page by visiting: http://www.facebook.com/210consulting?v=app_4949752878&ref=ts I can simply say, go to http://facebook.com/210consulting. Not only does it look nicer on a business card and email signature, but it is also easier to remember. To set up a vanity URL for your page, you need to have at least 25 people who like your page. Once you reach this number you can then visit http://facebook.com/username and claim your URL. Make sure you spell your new vanity URL properly and that you are NOT violating any trademark laws! You remember what happened to this rather large group of 47,000 fans. Facebook will not change the links once you select them, so take some time to think this through before claiming yours.

Get Custom Landing Pages

What a better way to engage your new fans than with a custom landing tab on your Facebook Business page. The possibilities on these tabs are virtually endless. I've seen everything from the implementation of welcome videos to mini versions of a full website built inside a tab. In fact, with the write person creating your tab, you could even do e-commerce right inside your Facebook page. These tabs can be branded to match your site and build your branding inside Facebook. These aren't always the simplest things to build, the take a pretty good knowledge of HTML & FBML to create. My suggestion is to hire a professional to build one for you. For a few hundred bucks you can have something great built that can pay off for itself in no time if it increases your business. If you need help setting a custom landing tab, contact us, we know the best in the biz at making these. If you implement these 6 simple steps into your Facebook Page strategies you will begin to see the conversion of people to your page increase greatly. If you have any questions, or need any more assistance with a Facebook Page, feel free to ask us. We would love to assist!

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

If you haven't noticed recently, spam has become a regular occurrence on most successful Facebook Pages. I have various different pages for all types of projects I am working on and so they get hit with spam almost daily on each page. When on coaching calls with my clients they ask me how to remove this spam and if there was a way to block these people from being repeat offenders. Well, there is!

Here's a short video on how to remove the spam from your wall, report them to Facebook, and permanently ban them from your page.

By removing the spam, it allows your visitors to see what your page is really about, to be able to interact with other fans safely and also not be turned off by the garbage that shows up on your wall. Luckily for me, most of the spam I have seen so far is just for work at home & make thousands each week. None of the pornographic material has shown up. Also, the links that are placed in these posts could be directed to a phishing or virus attacking site.

If visitors to your page feel the slightest threat of their computer being attacked/hacked, they will leave. So make sure to visit your page regularly and monitor for spam. If it does have some, follow the steps in the video above and keep it clean.

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

This past week I have spent hours erasing data from old computers that are laying around my house. At first I just thought, well, I can just go into the documents/settings files and delete things out and I would be good. But, after a conversation with my brother-in-law I realized that there is much more concern. From our discussions I learned rather quickly that when you get ready to dispose of an old hard drive, simply deleting the content is not really erasing it.

He also shared with me that when you take a computer to an electronics store and they say the hard drive is fried that I should be asking for it back to take with me. You never know where that piece of equipment might end up and you could be in serious trouble if it ends up in the wrong hands. Think about it, how many times have we punched our credit card number into a website to purchase a product, filled out a form with our social security number, saved private personal information onto a computer? I know that nowadays I pay all my bills online. I hate wasting paper, buying stamps and even just the walk to the mailbox. Instead, I enjoy being able to sit down at my computer and within 15 minutes pay all my bills for a month. But each time I make that payment, something is being stored onto my hard drive.

When your machine is now obsolete and longer being used, what do you do to dispose of them? Do you simply take them to the dump and throw them into a bin with the other few hundreds of computers? Do you recycle them? Either way, before taking them in, do you take the necessary steps to remove all your data to protect yourself against identity theft? Hackers are becoming more intelligent and learning better ways to hack into old computers. They say that until a hard drive is written over multiple times the data can actually be recovered. This is how organizations like the CIA & FBI are able to get data from a computer that seems to have been cleared and solve cases.

How to Protect Yourself

There are several different programs that are around for clearing your hard drive once you are finished with a computer. The first way is to use a giant electromagnet and wipe it clean. There are companies that will do this for you for a few dollars, or you can buy a machine to do it yourself for a few thousand dollars. The second option would be to remove the hard drive and physically destroy it with a sledgehammer, drill, saw, etc. While this option seems like it could be more fun, it is a little bit more dangerous. The third option is to use some simple software to destroy any info on the hard drive. The program though that I have have found for erasing old PC's is Darik's Boot and Nuke. This program will re-write over a hard drive 7 times which leaves things almost impossible for a hacker to find your old data. This way, when you take your computer to the local computer shop for recycling, you do not need to worry about your personal identity and data falling into the wrong hands. What about other items with Hard Drives? Did you know that machines like a basic copier machine have a hard drive in them? How easy is it for your information to fall into other hands on this type of machine? Well, from the video below, it looks like only about $300 and a free program from the internet. After that they can have any and all information that was ever stored on the hard drive of this machine.

So before you dispose of your next computer or old copier machine, make sure to take a little bit of time and erase your identity before throwing it away in the dumpster.

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors    Photo Credit