Enrichment Depot – Profiting on the Net

Inspiration strikes in strange ways; in this case, I reached the end of Neil Patel’s excellent article covering 13 questions you should ask yourself while writing a blog post. In his discussion of the last question, he compared a blog post to a restaurant meal. Will your reader complain about your blog post because you’ve served them skimpy fare? Are you feeding people content so they are full when they leave your site…or are they hungry, looking for more? Patel asked. If they are still hungry, your readers probably won’t come back. So if your readers are devouring your blog content, th…
SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization Tutorials

Tags: Blogs, Feed, Readers, Well

The following is part of a series on automation. In this post we will be looking at using two tools, Hootsuite and Bufferapp to complement each other. If you haven’t read my Hootsuite review and Bufferapp review already, it’s probably a good idea to read them first because I will be building on those two posts. It’s also probably a good idea if you read how to use the Hootsuite bulk scheduling tool as well.

One of the hallmarks of creating a good Twitter feed is being a good content curator. It’s not just about pushing out your content or having social media conversations, but it’s about pushing out good content/links that are interesting to your audience and relevant to your niche. If you are a running a BBQ blog and Twitter account, you probably don’t want to be tweeting about PETA and vegan information–unless, of course, you want to have a non engaged account.

My first recommendation is to build up a list of “classic” evergreen content in your space. For the best results, try to get 100-200 different tweets and links (you should constantly be growing and adding to this list). Depending on how active your audience is you can tweet out 1-3 curated links per day. If you have 200 of them and you tweet out 3 per day, you will go at least two months before you repeat. I like to keep these in a spreadsheet and use the Hootsuite bulk scheduler to make sure I have at least 2-3 tweets per day.

Next, hopefully you are keeping on top of what’s going on in your sector from a current events perspective. When you come across something newsworthy, send it to bufferapp. It will auto schedule through bufferapp and fill up your tweet queue. By using these two products in conjunction with each other, you take advantage of their strengths, make sure you are tweeting regularly, and keep your tweet stream fresh and up to date.

You will have to take some care in making sure your scheduled tweets don’t bunch up with your bufferapp tweets. If you are using archived tweets (see How to Tweet From Your Archives), that’s another variable in the mix that you have to work with. Lastly, you will need to take care and make sure your new posts don’t bunch up or step on any of the others posts. If you are having a conversation or Twitter rant, burst tweeting works. For content promotion, especially evergreen content,  spread your tweets out over the day for maximum effectiveness. It sounds complicated but it’s really not. A sheet of paper and pen should do the trick. Mix up the evergreen, news, and new content posts. Look at your analytics to see which gets you the most response and test and adapt.

Content promotion is a cornerstone aspect of social media. As long as you aren’t pushing only your content, people respond to you much more positively. I would go so far as to say keep the self serving tweets to 20-30 % of your total activity. If people see you posting good stuff from others regularly and once a week you promote yourself and ask nicely for a retweet, you will get a better response.

Some people take offense to this approach, thinking that automated or semi-automated publishing is bad. They believe that Twitter should be just about real time conversations and engagement. Conversations are important, but they are time investments without much ROI, so look at them carefully. Are you on Twitter to connect with real friends or are you on Twitter to ultimately do business? Problem solving and customer service tweets are your most effective ROI. Chances are you can come up with 20-50 common questions/problems people have. Set up a text document or spreadsheet for these cases with pre-programmed answers. Using saved searches or rss searches, look for questions or issues. See if you have a standard answer or one that can be easily adapted. Sometimes you aren’t the best source for the answer; in that case, refer them to a government or educational resource. Sometimes a competing or complimentary business is a better source, and that’s ok.  Your main concern should be to solve the problem for the consumer. People remember you for being helpful. The last thing you want to do is come across as self serving social media guru who only links to themselves and talks about themselves. It’s a sure fire way to guarantee you’ll come off as a stuck-up, ego centric jerk. Trust me. If you are a huge brand and deal only in information, you might be able to get away with being broadcast only but, for most, a semi-automated solution with scripted responses to common problems works much better.

Unless you have a large company and customer service plays a big role, having one or more people working solely on Twitter/Facebook etc. is a waste of time. During the day, 20-30 minutes / 2-3 times a day should be enough. When you have big push, yes, you will need to spend more time, but by and large it’s overkill. Not to take dig at the purely social media consultants, but they spend all day promoting themselves on Twitter. In an attention-based economy, they are trying to get more clients and billable hours, but that probably isn’t your goal. Your goal is to extract as much profit and sales with the smallest investment of time and resources. The only reasonable way to do that is with some form of automation.

So what are the takeaways from this posts:

• Automated or semi automated tweet streams aren’t evil. If a human wrote them and scheduled it, there nothing deceptive about it. Scraping and robo-tweeting without any human input is much more problematic.
• Use the tools to their strengths. Plugins that auto-publish blog posts free you from being tied to your blog.
• Build a body of work of ever expanding evergreen tweets. Use a schedule tool with them, trying to not repeat individual posts too often.
• Use auto scheduling tools for news and current events.
• Mix in archive tweets from your evergreen posts. Try to not overwhelm people with self serving content.
• Be on the lookout for big players in your space to retweet. Nothing gets someone as excited as a natural unsolicited tweet from a friend, colleague, or similar service.
• Conversations and customer service are a necessary evil in social media. Look for ways to minimize the time you spend there with a library of answers to common questions. Customer service is hard. Your people need to know when to color outside the lines. Give them the authority to solve problems on the spot. Letting customer problems fester is hardly ever the best solution.
• The key is finding a balance between human interaction and automation is knowing that sometimes you need to adapt. At the end of the day, social media is about being social. The key is finding tools and workflows that minimize your time investment without losing that human touch.

photo credit:  Photospin

Related posts:

1. Bufferapp Review The following is part of a series on the Bufferapp…
2. How to Use the Hootsuite Bulk Scheduling Tool The following is part of a series on using the…
3. HootSuite Review Late last year, the solution I was using to post…
4. How to Be Involved on Twitter in Less Than an Hour a Day The following is part of a series on Hootsuite Social…
5. How to use Hootsuite to Publish to Your Facebook Page The following is part of a series on using the…

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How to Automate a Twitter Feed with Hootsuite and Bufferapp

Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Tags: @Twitter, Automate, Bufferapp, Feed, Hootsuite

Facebook may be toying with a remake of their News Feed that exposes users to a dramatically higher level of content while bringing new user interactions to posts, comments, images, and other content.

An Unfiltered Feed

As reported by the Wall…

Search Engine Watch

Tags: Drop, Facebook's, Feed, Filter, Functions, News

This guest post is by Tommy Walker, Online Marketing Strategist and owner of Tommy.ismy.name.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? This old cliché has become especially true in blogging. It’s statistically proven that by inserting compelling photographs into your blog posts, you’re able to better retain your reader’s attention.

So what if photos are also exactly what you need to stand out on the world’s most popular social network?

On Facebook, Photos are the most used features of the site (after status updates of course). You may have already known that, but did you also know that Facebook is one of the most used photo sharing platforms on the entire Internet?

So how can we tap into the power of Facebook Photos to separate your Page from the rest of the noise on Facebook?

If you’ve been using Facebook ads to perform inception on your blog, you’ll have a good idea of the psychographic profile of your readers. We can use this information to create (or find) compelling images that will resonate with your audience.

Let’s imagine I run a blog about creating Hollywood movie props on an indie movie budget. Normally I build simple props that are pretty general, like ray guns, or jet packs. But lately I’ve been running Facebook ads and I’ve learned from the Responder Profile report that the majority of the people who clicked on my ad have listed “Iron Man” as a favorite movie in their profile.

Knowing this, I create a tutorial for my blog that gives instructions on how to make an Iron Man mask.

To really draw attention to this step-by-step tutorial and stand out in my fans’ news feeds only requires a little extra thought and attention to detail. Just a little more work, and I get a result that looks something like this:

Now let’s break down what I did here, so you can create results like this, too.

Step 1: Breaking up the image

Take the main image that you would like to show up in the News Feed and break it up into two or three parts using a photo editor. For the Iron Man album, I broke one photo up into two separate images, with each image highlighting a different element of the build.

The original image looks like this:

To break it up, I simply opened the image in Gimp (although you could use Photoshop or even Paint!) and selected the Battery and Arc Reactor. Then I copied and pasted it into its own image file, and did the same for the mask.

I then very quickly created the album cover by typing “Become” over the Iron Man logo, and saved that as its own image file> I then saved everything to its own folder on my desktop.

Here are two quick notes about album covers. Firstly, selecting the right image is important for two reasons:

1. The album cover is the first thing people see when someone clicks on the Photos tab on your page. By default, Facebook also displays the two most recent photo albums on the left-hand sidebar underneath the list of people who like your page. When they visit a page, it’s only natural for people to check out the number of people who like that page — for social proof. Take advantage of this curiosity by creating an eye-catching album cover. Even with a small number of likes, you’ll appear to be ahead of the game, as this is valuable real estate that most pages simply aren’t taking advantage of.
   
2. The album cover will always appear in the furthest left-hand corner when you publish an album to the news feed. Selecting the wrong image for the album cover can make the entire update completely pointless. take a look at the images below. By default, the photo titled “Step 5″ would be the album cover here, but it’s not a great image. To have the most impact on the News Feed, you’d want to make sure that the album cover shows the image titled “Step 10.” We’ll talk about this more in the next section.

Step 2: Selecting the album cover and organizing your photos

Go to the Photos tab on your Business Page and click on Create a Photo Album.

A dialog box will appear, giving you instructions on uploading your photos.

Click Select Photos and choose the photos you would like to be included in the album.

Click Open once you’ve selected all of the photos for your album. The photos will begin to be uploaded to the album. By default, the album is named with the date and time that you’re uploading the photos. Change the name to reflect the contents of the album. Also, check the High Resolution button (just because you can!).

Once the photos have finished uploading, click Create Album.

From here, select the image you want to use for the cover of your album. Also feel free to add descriptions to your pictures. If it makes sense, insert links to relevant pages within your blog (this will depend on the content of your album).

Once you’re satisfied with your Photo descriptions, click Save Changes. A dialog box will appear prompting you to Publish or Skip.

Do not click publish!

Click Skip. You will be brought to the album and all of the images will appear in the order in which they were uploaded. This isn’t always ideal if you’re really looking to stand out in the news feed.

It is vital to note the arrangement of the photos in the album, as it will determine their order in the news feed.

As I said earlier, Facebook automatically puts the album cover as the far left image of the three in the album preview in the news feed—regardless of how the images are arranged in the album. Facebook then takes the two images after the photo that’s designated as the cover, and assigns them as the middle and far-right images in the news feed.

So if the photos are arranged like this in the album:

They will look like this in the news feed:

To achieve this landscape effect in the news feed, simply drag the two images that are meant to follow the album cover in the order in which you’d like them to appear in the news feed.

Then, your album will look like this:

And the feed will look like this:

Once you have your photos arranged the way you’d like them to appear in the news feed, all you have left to do is create an album description and publish the album.

Step 3: Entering your album’s description

Underneath your photos, you’ll see an Add a Caption link. Click it to open the popup where you can describe your album and include any external links.

Facebook will allow a total of 320 characters (including spaces) in your album description before it hides the content and adds a See More link to the end of your description.

Keep your descriptions around one to two lines, and always put a line break between your description and link so that the content appears cleanly in the news feed.

After you’ve clicked Save, click Edit Album Info to see the Album Description page. Click the Edit Photos tab on the top right of the gray box. Then, click Publish Now.

And there you have it! Your album will have a good chance of standing out in the otherwise really crowded news feed!

What’s that you say? You don’t make props? There are all sorts of other creative ways to use Facebook Photos to promote your business. What are some ways you’ve used this tool? Are there other Facebook Photo ideas you can share?

Tommy is an Online Marketing Strategist and owner of Tommy.ismy.name. He is about to release Hack The Social Network, the ultimate guide to Facebook Marketing, and is currently developing a “mind hacking” course.

Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips

Use Photos to Stand Out in the Facebook News Feed

ProBlogger Blog Tips

Tags: facebook, Feed, News, Photos, Stand