InBoundMarketingPR Blog

Facebook for Inbound Marketing

When I was first introduced to Facebook, I dismissed it as a social site for "college students," which I was not. Couple of years later, this social media phenomenon is only 6 years old and boasting 500+ million users daily. It's been written that Facebook, just based on reach, is one of the most successful internet startups in history! The question all businesses should be asking themselves is: Why aren't I utilizing this amazing tool for my business? Just based on these stats, if you don't understand facebook, you should make an effort to. I really urge you to understand this captive audience.  

• Profiles - Remember that people have Profiles and brands have fan pages. Set up a profile page for whoever will be managing your brand fan page and then have them set up that company/brand fan page. 
• Socialized connections - In every "niche" there is a central socially connected people. Find those people and befriend them. They will be your dinner host and help you to make new acquaintances and teach you proper facebook etiquette. 
• Sharing - If you are reading or creating something in your niche that you find facinating, be kind and share this with your friends on Facebook. Sharing of relevant information is what social media is all about. Interacting, engaging, commenting, re-posting embody what social media is all about.
• Research - Research your audience so you can provide them with what they need. Listening and observing is such an important part of metrics in social media. Did you know that woman are talked to more on social media platforms?  Women have 35% more posts on their walls than men do. If your product is geared more towards woman this is an important and relevant piece of information!
• Buzzwords - Research has show that posts with certain buzzwords were less likely to be shared. These buzzwords included optimization, seo, consultating, productivity, blogger, collaboration, competitive, conversation, integrated and last but not least advertising.  
• "Liked" - Facebookers like to talk about food. Pages with the words ice cream, choc, milk, fruit, sugar had more fans than pages without these buzzwords. Interesting research for businesses who offer these products. 
• Entertainment - Because Facebook is really more of a "social site" than platforms like Twitter, Facebookers who post about movies, tv shows, books, music, tv, athletics, actors, parks, comedians, trains, games, sports teams, film, food and beverage were liked more than posts that didn't include these buzzwords. 

The important takeaways here is that you must jump in and start listening, observing, sharing and interacting in order to get in the swing of things. Utilize this incredible platform to build brand awareness, build relationships and harness Facebook's tremendous growth for inbound marketing purposes to your company website, blog site or online store.

At InboundMarketingPR, we help you get the conversation started!

Facebook - Social Media Exodus

Surveys being conducted and questions being asked surely communicate that Facebook is a conundrum to many of it's millions of users. Criticism pertaining to constant changes, over-sharing of personal information and lack of proper communication by facebook has left many frustrated.  

According to this particular survey I took on Mashable, 32% voted yes for exiting, 41% voted no and 27% were unsure or were considering it. Some people feel that they have invested too much time, information and made some great connections that they do not want to loose. Many feel that even though Facebook continues to anger the millions of users, people stay because there is no other platform that has a bigger buzz around it right now. Others point out that every time Facebook makes changes they anger many users but these changes lead to continual growth and time spent on the site. These are all fantastic observations made by savvy users.

One thing Facebook does really well is listen to it's users concerns and respond to those concerns in a swift manner. This article, written by Mark Zuckerberg showed up on The Washington Post's website on May 24, 2010. Zuckerberg points out  the principles under which Facebook operates:

• You have control over how your information is share.
• We do not share your personal information with people or service you don't want.
• We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.
• We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.
• We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

 This particular article was "liked" by 14,469 people, buzzed 1,304 times and Dugg 232 times.

It seems to me that the majority of the people that are revolting are people that don't quite understand how to protect their personal information on Facebook. Here is a great explanation on "Controlling How You Share"  on Facebook's privacy site. First change introduce is a "master" control to set for all information ever shared or to be shared in the future. If you like a more granular controls for specified content, you can control individual fields. Second change is facebook has reduced the amount of basic information that was visible to everyone. These fields will not have to be Public anymore. If you don't want to share your phone number, birthdate and/or email address you don't have to!

Facebook specifically informs you that even though they need your email address to open an account, you do not have to share your email address with anyone. Third, facebook has made it simple to control whether applications and websites can access any of your information. Many of us use this platform as a business networking site and so if you don't use many of these applications or enjoy the games on Facebook, you can easily turn off the platform completely. This will assure you that none of your information is shared with applications or websites.

So, after reviewing all this new information and educating yourself, will you be among the Facebook Exodus? If so, why? I'm sure Facebook would love your feedback as would we at InboundMarketingPR.

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Targeted Inbound Marketing: Your Niche on Twitter

Facebook's growth has sky rocketed and with the changes announced at F8 conference, the brand's popularity just keeps growing. Having said this, don't discount on Twitter being done. New research shows that both social media platforms are nearly equal when it comes to awareness. The research uncovered shows many convincing reasons why you need to better understand Twitter usage and the importance of applying this information to your business and inbound marketing efforts.   

This is why you need to clean out your Twitter and concentrate on targeting your niche. I have found four tools that I will review for you. 

• Refollow -  Refollow has the usual who's following me, who isn't but the feature that I really like is that you can drill down to your niche with specific searches.  For example, I searched for social media and it brought up everyone who had specifically used the word social media in their bio.  Powerful tool for companies wanting to find individuals who are specifically interested in their products because they have said so in their bio. You could filter your users in so many categories. Go and explore this tool, it's Free and easy to use.
• ManageTwitter - They will only process the most recent 5000 people who follow you due to twitter's API limits. This tool took a long time to download my account information. Once this tool manages to get your account info it does have some great features.  For example, it shows you when accounts were created, if the users are quiet or talkative and how many people have unfollowed them. It also shows you how active that Twitter account is by showing you the number of tweets per day.  Nice features with good information.  
• Twit Cleaner - This tool analyses the people you follow, finds spammers, bots and time wasters. The problem with is tool is that it only scans up to 1,000 followers for you for free. The reports are free but if you wish to clean up your account it will start to cost you $2 for 1,000 to 1,9999 followers etc. There is no need to pay for any service like this when you can manually do this with any other tool out there, it just requires you to be disciplined. Commit to cleaning your account once a week and give yourself half an hour. That should keep your account growing with relevant followers and help you to weed out the spammers.  
• tweepi - I've been using tweepi and really like this tool.  It's fast and allows you to again flush out your Twitter account from spammers, bots etc and helps you to find tweeps or geeky follow. This tool helps you filter these people based on their activity and sociability. When you flush users out there are Preset Targets that are very useful. There is a target for Active Users (no of updates in the last 7 days), so you can see the updates these tweeps have had in the last week and follow accordingly. Another target is the higher reach or influence. This target shows you the number of tweets and number of times they are getting RT's. Another one is twitterers who discuss much. This is useful because it shows you who tends to receive and send out replies, thus following the social guidelines. One of my favorite target is the "avoid linkless ramblings." This options sorts the users by the number of links in their posts. You are looking for a ratio between 40% - 80% links because this shows a two-way conversation. Ratios of 80% of higher might indicate a bot.   

I enjoyed using all these tools and testing them out. I have a couple that are my favorites and will be using them on a daily basis.  Which tool is your favorite? Which one saves you the most time? 

Remember, Twitter users frequently exchange information about products and services. Make sure you are monitoring conversations about your business and providing compelling content for them to discuss. 

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InBound Marketing: F8 Changes- Opportunities for Your Business

In the inbound marketing world, everyone is buzzing about Facebook and the changes they are implementing. Many people are throwing words around like trust, transformational, visionary, scary and blown away!  If you haven't heard Facebook is going to be ubiquitous on the world wide web. If that doesn't get your attention, they are reporting that there are 400 million people using Facebook!  Facebook should be on your radar business owners.

Some of the announced changes are the Social Plugins, the Open Graph and the Insights.  Let me tell you why these changes are pivotal to your business.

The Social Plugins -  This is your digital fingerprint and makes your online experience more social and personalized. You can visit any site and without having to sign in you can like the content there.  This will connect you to that piece of content instantaneously.  It will also show you which of your friends are also fans or like this page, blog etc.  This real time, sociable, personalize experience will get more viewers to your site because it will increase your reach.  

 The Open Graph - Ties in all your connections and relationships you have online.  Example, if you visit Yelp and they know who you are and were you live, they can suggest restaurant or businesses based on your data and experiences.  The Open Graph looks to tie in all those maps you are building in a very simplistic way! This will be a great tool for advertisers and ad targeting.

The Insights - You have been given some data before if you have a business fan page but it's been insufficient.  The new insights will give you information as to where those fans are coming from.  Like ads, streams or friend suggestions.  This new measurable data will be important to your business.

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Foursquare, Why It's H-O-T Marketing

The buzz around Foursquare today is the same as it was for Twitter in 2006. Why is Foursquare so hot?  For starters it's a mobile application that lets you explore the city around you, meet up with friends and earn perks while you check-in to your favorite places. The company was founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai and is based in New York City.  

Mobile applications and geo targeting is the next step in the progression of digital advertising and marketing for your company. Seeing Facebook embrace this trend by taking a similar approach when it introduces location features to its 400 million users in coming months only solidifies the momentum of the mobile applications.  Here's what you, the users, are saying about it.  As a brand/company, the possibilities for exposure are endless, data collected and measurable metrics are mind boggling.  Don't think this will work for your business? Foursquare is already rolling out new tools for businesses.

So, are you using Foursquare? Are you using it for business or as a consumer? What perks have you unearthed that you might not have without this app? I am keeping my eye on Fousquare and am very interested to see what new features they roll out and how they will help consumers/businesses in the process to grow organically.

Involvement is Evolvement. Will You Evolve in 2010?

Evolve comes from the Latin word, evolvere, meaning to develop, work out (socially, politically and literary philosophies).  It's interesting to me that the word "social" is mentioned in context with evolve.  We all know how important social connections were in 2009. For example YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Facebook and any discussion forum with good content and enriching debate.  If you weren't on these sites you weren't part of the eloquent conversations taking place!  But these "social" tools aren't meant for just personal involvement alone, they are also being used for company evolvement.

If 2009 wasn't the year you were connected, please do yourself and your company a favor by connecting in 2010.   This article featured in Entrepreneur.com says it all. It touches on important points of how social sites establish another source, an extension of your business/website.  How important fans/friends/followers are because they can turn into customers, increasing your ROI.  It touches on the importance of SEO and organic traffic to your company websites.  It shows how these sites become commnunities for your company helping to solidify your brand. These sites become your eyes and ears online.  You can monitor who is saying what about your company and every interaction is a great opportunity and a wealth of information.  Notice how the article only mentions Facebook but the same holds true for other, equally as important, social sites.  As a business owner you can see the incredible potential being connected offers your company.

So, I will ask again...  Will you evolve in 2010?  I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we at InboundMarketingPR can assist you with all the above services and connect you with the most powerful service your company can not afford to miss.  We wish you all the best and a Prosperous 2010.

How To-Why Twitter Lists are Important to your Brand!

Twitter has recently rolled out a new feature which allows you to create lists of different tweets you are interested in categorizing. By now, all of you should have received the update. Some of you might be asking, “Why are these lists important and how will they impact my company, business and brand?”

I am here to give you 9 important reasons why you should pay attention to these lists.

1. Lists Increase your REACH! That’s right, the number of followers should increase for you dramatically. Your growth will increase because of the gain of “eyes” that view these lists. Some people are reporting a gain of 1,000 followers within a short amount of time.
2. Lists Help you Become the Source of Information! By creating lists with great content and relevant information You become the ” Thought Leader” and therefore, control the major portal of information for you followers!
3. Lists Help to surface PR Opportunities! You create great lists that help to aggregate information. Example: Create a list with just bloggers and reporters! This list then becomes a great source of information for many of your followers!
4. Lists Help to Personalize Your Company! You can create a lists of your companies employees. By aggregating their tweets, your followers can quickly pull the list and see what is going on or being shared by your employess. Connections can also be made this way!
5. Lists Allow you to be more transparent! Share your lists with others on sites like Facebook and Listorious and make them Public! If you make them private, they don’t benefit anyon!
6. Lists Monitor your lists! By monitoring whose lists you are on, you can see the additional Reach they give you!
7. Lists Can Be Measured! Hubspot's Grader is also including the lists in their results!
8. Lists Can be keyword optimized! Set up your lists based on your specific “keywords”! This will only help to build your company and your brand. Can google or other search engines pick up on these lists “keywords”? It’s too early too tell, but make no mistake this tool can only help you!
9. Lists Are aggregators of information! Use them to your best advantage and jump in and start creating these lists. You can edit/delete if you make a mistake!

Hope this post was both useful and informative to you. My wish is that you can get excited about these lists once you see their true potential!