One of the important components of being a web socialite is the ability to throw out URLs like business cards. You might have seen how many people waited patiently to get their vanity URL on Facebook. There is a simple way (if you know how to edit your .htaccess file) to create a redirect to your page.
So, you can simply forward something like http://www.yourcompanyname.com/facebook to your Facebook page.
Here’s what I want to do – for those of you who don’t have a clue on how to get started on using social media, I’m going to give you my 6 steps list to get you started. You might already know all this, or it might be first time you are learning about this, either way, I’m sure you will get something out of it.
Let’s assume you have build your company website, and you want to add more traffic to it. Here are the first 6 steps you can take to begin your journey into the world of social media marketing.
Step One – Get a Blog
Why a blog? First, it gives you a way to update your customers or users on what you are doing as a company. Second, it is date organized, which means content always stays fresh. Third, with a blog you can increase your SEO rankings through inbound links. In writing a blog you are not only reaching out to your customers and giving them an avenue to interact with you on relatively informal (friendly) level, you are also creating a platform from which all your other social media marketing efforts can jump off from.
So how do you get a blog? Blogs have been around long enough that it is not difficult to get one. Now to get a GOOD one is another story. Through the years I’ve used MovableType, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Vox, Squarespace. Look for at least the following features – ease of installation, large theme resource, ability to easily edit CSS and template files, and have good widgets and plugins build for it. Most are free, but some are paid, or have premium services. If you do not have an IT team in your company to support your blog save yourself the pain of constant updating and go with the hosted blogs like Wordpress.com, Blogger, Typepad, and Squarespace.
Step Two – Make Your Blog Known
If you have registered for a blog on one of the hosted blog service providers, congratulations, you would have already inherited a group of bloggers who will most likely “stumble upon” your blog. If your blog is self hosted, you have a little more work to do. First, identify a list of online blog directories you can submit your blog to. Here are a few, but please do some research on more niche directories depending on your business type:
Another element to making your blog known has to do with the word ping. After you write a blog article, a pinging service will automatically inform all blog search services that you have updated your blog. Sign up for a few services like Pingoat, Pingvine, and SEO Zoo has a list of Ping URLs to include if you would like to do it manually as well.
Step 3 – Work on RSS RSS is important because people don’t want to have to visit your site everytime they want to read about you. So you need to make your blog easily subscribable through RSS. I’ve used Feedburner and I highly recommend them. If your blog already has a URL to your RSS feed, why do you need a feed aggregator web app like Feedburner? This is more for ability for tracking as well as portability. Feedburner provides additional statistical information that your RSS feed doesn’t provide, and for portability – say you want to switch blog providers, from Blogger to Wordpress. You don’t have to re-publicize your feed if you use Feedburner – the world knows your RSS feed as http://feeds.feedbuner.com/yourcompanyname, and all you need to do is to update the blog RSS it points to. That way you don’t lose your readership.
Step 4 – Get a Twitter Account
If you already have a personal Twitter account, try to keep it separate from your company’s and start a new one. Although, having said that there is no harm is combining your personal and business accounts as one. Then do a Twitter search, TweetDeck or Yahoo! Sideline to locate your target audience on twitter. Follow them to gain exposure. Whether or not they follow you back is beyond your control, but if you have good content and they are interested, they will follow. Once you have a pool of followers, it is easy to market your products or services to them through Twitter. Make sure you learn about the usage of “@” and “#” on Twitter, and use them well.
Step 5 – Get on Facebook
In the past Facebook was closed, and you could only interact with people within your network. With the rising popularity of Twitter, Facebook now has also become more open. The re-vamp of Facebook Pages provides companies another engine to market their website. Create a Facebook Page for your company website, and invite your friends to become fans. Whenever you post an update on your Facebook page, it automatically gets added to your fans’ news feed, and as a result they will be informed on your company’s activities, new launches or offerings.
Step 6 – Blog + Twitter + Facebook
So you now have a blog, a twitter account, and Facebook account – make them work for you!
1. Use a Twitter widget to embed your Tweets on your blog.
2. Use an automatic tweet generator like Twitterfeed or Pingvine to post a tweet whenever you update your blog.
3. Make sure that when you update your Twitter feed your Facebook status gets updated as well. That way, not double work. The latest version of Tweetdeck does that, or you can use the Twitter Application found on Facebook.
4. Add your company website URL on your profiles on Twitter and Facebook. Always include them when you have the chance.
What I’ve told you above is just the beginning. There are so many ways you can leverage the tools out there. Be creative, take a look at how Threadless, Zappos do it. The main thing is to keep things fresh, current and frequent, so you don’t fall off the radar, build relationships using your tweets and Facebook friends and fans.
If you have other tips for social media newbies to learn from on how to get started building online relationships and traffic, please add a comment on this blog post.
So I have a theory. I’ll start off with a question for you – What are the success factors that go into a creation of a great social media website? One of the difficult questions facing social media today is how the hell do you measure it? Is it by your member count? Are the members doing what you want them to do on your site? What makes them come back, and how do you make sure they do, because a social site without a community and interactions, is, sort of not one at all, right?
I’ve been talking to friends and family, yes, they are my test subjects – what better way to get good feedback than to ask the participants themselves? From the answers I have gathered, I have devised a framework that I think might be useful for anyone who is thinking of starting a social site.
I call it the FRESHAnalysis. Yes – another acronym for the masses. Enjoy. FRESH stands for Friendliness, Relevance, Engagement, Simplicity, and Handiness. You see, with a framework like this, only then can you focus on creating metrics and analytics to measure their success. With me so far?
Let’s go into deeper detail:
Friendliness Jakob Nielson comes to mind. He is like the father of website usability. When I first got into the web business, I knew about him. I read his articles on how bad Flash was, how you should have clear navigation, how users are trained to see the blue color as links etc etc. all good stuff. So what do I mean by friendliness? It’s exactly that – How friendly is your site to the masses? Is it easy to navigate? How do you structure your content? Social Media is all about interaction, so unlike the old style website, where you simply write boring statements describing your product, or service, you need to make sure your social media site “interacts” with the visitor. Don’t just make statements, ask questions. Flickr has the famous “Hello” in different languages; Twitter has “What are you doing?”; Facebook recently just got friendlier with “What’s on your mind?”. Making people feel comfortable on your site does go a long way in gaining popularity and return visits.
Relevance
This one’s a bit tricky. One would assume that when you build a social media site, you are targeting a global audience. If you do that, you might end up targeting no one. See how MySpace has evolved to target the teens and musicians, and Facebook is for the more mature crowd? Don’t forget that geography plays a big role in Relevance too. Something that is hot in the US doesn’t mean it will be hot everywhere else. Many of my friends don’t “get” Twitter because they are conservative, private individuals who don’t see the point in “tweeting” where you are, or what you are doing. Companies need to understand that cultural differences do exist, and develop strategies to provide relevant features for their targeted segment.
Engagement
How much time are people spending on your site? As a social media site, it makes sense to keep your visitor on your site for as long as possible, and making sure that person comes back as often as possible. In this day and age, there are many ways to be “on your site” – email alerts, subscriptions via RSS, games, photo uploads, video uploads just to name a few. With this goal in mind, it is your job as a marketer to decide what relevant features and activities to provide based on your target audience’s preferences and tastes. Remember the games you played on Facebook and the time you wasted? Facebook owns you.
Simplicity
You must have heard the phrase “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”. Easier said than done, right? If you don’t understand what a site does, will you be open to what it has to offer? The answer is no. So in order to attract visitors to use your services, please simplify your messaging and make sure your site reflects that.
Handiness
In an online world of web widgets and open APIs, don’t just give your users one way to access your services, give them many options. Create a mobile version, leverage RSS, build widgets, leverage existing platforms like Facebook Connect, Yahoo! OpenID, get a Twitter feed – the key is to reach as many people as possible and make your service handy, accessible anywhere and anyway.
There you have it, the FRESH Analysis – The Framework for Evaluating Social Media Success. One of the limitations of this theory is it doesn’t take into consideration ROI and revenue generation capabilities. I believe that is another story for another time. As I develop this theory further I will propose measurements and metrics for this. In the meantime, here’s my challenge to you – How FRESH is your site?
