Business Ascentials-Blog

Email newsletter and backlinks.

January 12th, 2010

If you want to upgrade your business email look, you should invest in creating an email newsletter. Your email newsletter should have a template that you use for all of your email correspondence with your company letterhead/image/logo, contact information, YouTube Channel name, updates, names and emails of pertinent people whom customers can get in touch with, store hours, etc.

There are many companies that can create one for you (some have free templates available), or you can create one yourself! Many companies will also give you a free 30-day trial. This advancement in itself will give your business more credibility to those with whom you correspond with.

When uploading a video to be viewed on YouTube, the use of keywords is essential. Here is how keywords work. When people want to view a video, they will type in a keyword into the search bar. After they hit return, videos with those keywords will appear in the search results. Well, you want your video to have the right keywords in its title, description, and tags, so it will pop up on potential customer’s search results. Pick descriptive words and try to find out what keywords other popular, relevant videos are using. Another important factor is your thumbnail. You should also make sure your thumbnail is attractive and interesting. This way it will catch people’s eyes and they will click it!

Some more good ideas are: you should post your video to your company blog (if your company does not have one, create one, it is easy and free!), other social network pages (as I mentioned before), and your company website. The more places your video appears, the more exposure it gets. This brings me to another good reason to post your video on these social networks sites: backlink credit. A backlink is basically a link to your site on other relevant web pages. The more popular and relevant the website, the more your website gets noticed by Google and the more they will advance in their search returns. Using YouTube, you get “backlink credit”!

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Posted in Business, Internet, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, Youtube

How To Send Facebook Page Updates

November 30th, 2009

Recently, Facebook introduced a new way of how to send Facebook Page Updates to  inform your fans of any updates that you make to your fan page.  There is a little debate whether this will be of any benefit or more of a hindrance to you when you update. There are some great features though.

For instance, you can target your updates to a geographical location or by sex or even age groups. This is a fantastic tool for anyone who has a broad market and want to target their audience more.

This video is less than  2 mins long so enjoy ‘ How to Send Facebook Page Updates’

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Posted in Business, Education, Facebook, Facebook Fan pages, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

How to Use Twitter Lists

October 31st, 2009

Twitter has just released their new List feature to the public in the past week and it looks like it will be a great application. There are a number of things that you can do with lists and I am going to give you a quick run down.

I will not explain how to create lists , but rather I have created a video below on the ways to create , manage and add lists to your profile. It is an easy to follow video so please have a look.

The new list feature will enable you to share the list link, or the URL, outside of twitter. This means that you can join Twitter Lists from any website that is displaying the URL. So for instance, here is a list called ‘social media experts’ that I have created, http://twitter.com/#/list/andymac71/social-media-experts that you can click on from here. Tha fact that you can use this outside Twitter  will be a great marketing tool.

Make sure that if it is a list that contains your Industry Leaders, you are a member of that list too. You are not automatically a member of your own list until you add yourself. To do this, you need to go to your own profile page and click on the manage list icon at the left of your follower counts.Then simply add YOU as a member of that list

The list Title will be important too. Name it well. People looking to follow your lists will be looking at the names to see which one is suitable for them to follow. If you have an unfamiliar or cryptic name, people wont follow that list.

Most people will create a list that is their “favourite this” or their “top that”, such as My Top celebrity Picks or Top Sports Bloggers on Twitter. That’s a great way to use these lists but in terms of Business, you want to think a bit more ahead.

Take a marketing approach and think of Lists as a marketing tool.

There are certain questions that you should ask when considering lists

Ask yourself these questions

  • Who are my target audience ( or customers)?
  • Do they fall into their own categories with different needs or interests? If so, what is each customer category?.
  • What are their outcomes in relation to my business
  • What kind of information do I need to send out in order for them to reach their outcomes?
  • What kind of information is this type of customer generally interested in?
  • Who are the key people on Twitter that often tweets that kind of information?

So I would create a list in relation to the categories that I had put them in.

Lets say that you have various area’s to your business. You might be a Business Coach who not only coaches one on one, but may also run seminars and maybe sell certain products. You could create lists that have those people interested in each offering/service. They can even be cross-listed too.

Its not too hard to do a Twitter search for people that are interested in the type of seminars you run, the type of coaching your Into etc

You just need to start thinking outside the box on how to keep a valuable list.

Good luck with lists.

Don’t forget to sign up to my BRAND NEW 21 day  eCourse on Social Media Marketing

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Posted in Business, Education, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, Twitter

Don’t Lose Connection with your Twitter Followers

August 8th, 2009

Social Media is all about building Relationships. People do business with people who they Know Like and Trust. This is an age old adage that still rings true for social media more than ever.

I often get the question of ‘How do you keep connected with all of your followers? and what do you do if you really  want to stay connected to some more than others?’

This will generally come up just after you have been playing around with twitter for only a few weeks, as more and more people you dont know, join your network.
I use a free application called TweetDeck, which sits on your desktop. 

The best bits of TweetDeck are its ability to show you everything you want to see all at one time like a dashboard, in an organized column format. It defaults with columns of @Replies, DM’s, and AllFriends. You can choose to keep or discard those columns (and bring them back again if you choose).

Its power becomes apparent when you start creating your own columns. This allows you to ‘file’ your follows. Want a steady stream of life coach tweets? Hit the ‘group’ button, and select all the life coaches you follow. You can do this to create columns of Industry experts, speaker coaches, celebrities, mentors, family and friends – and organize the columns on your screen by moving them left or right. If you have 5 columns built, just use the sliding bar on the bottom. If you keep TweetDeck running, it keeps a  record of tweets, allowing you to go to a column after being away, and catch up. Caution: while friends, DM’s and @Replies are default settings, if you delete a custom column you must recreate from scratch – so think carefully before hitting that delete button!

TweetDeck also allows you to isolate individuals you follow by clicking their name at the bottom of a tweet, giving you a list of their stats and a log of recent tweets. Did your friend just @Reply someone you don’t know? Click their name in the tweet and they will show up as well, allowing you to follow, and even assign them to a column of your choice.

The other cool thing that Tweetdeck does is let you see your Facebook friends’ status updates at the same time. You may be able to see in the picture that i am quickly and easily able to see whats going on in both Twitter and facebook.

Looking for people talking on a particular topic? Create a search column on your term, and see a stream of Twitterers perfect for your list.

I will be creating a video on how to use this fanatstic application in the coming few posts so keep an eye out for it.

Happy Tweeting…

If you would like listen in to the free webinar that I am conducting over the next 6 weeks on How to grow your Business using Social Media then please register here

I have also created my new Business Ascentials Fan page so please join me where i will be adding some additional tips , tricks and Information too.

Posted in Social Media

Using News Feeds and Status Updates on Facebook

July 30th, 2009

If you have a large amount of followers on facebook and you just cant keep up with all of the news feeds and Status updates on your facebook page, then I have some great news.
You may want to only check your facebook page every second day or you may want to be able to filter what you see on those updates. There may be people in your friend list that continually update their status with meaningless, mundane stuff that you are not interested in. Facebook lets you now organise your friends into certain lists that you can easily check through to see whats going on in their world.
I have made a quick video about how to do this and hopefully it will change the way you look at your facebook home page. Please let me know what you think by posting a comment on the bottom of this post.

And remember, if you have any questions about social media, please ask me, I will personally answer them for you.

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Posted in Computers, Education, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking

Unfollowing Bulk People on Twitter

July 21st, 2009

This question is coming up more frequently as peoples’ Twitter following gets bigger. I have used 3 different applications for this very process. Let me explain them for you and you can choose which one is best for you…
1.    Twitter karma This lets you unfollow en mass and is easy to do pretty quickly.
2.    Friendorfollow This lets you mass unfollow and also mass follow people.
3.    Untweeps This lets you unfollow people that have not tweeted in a certain amount of time

1. Twitter Karma
I think this one is the best for what you want.. Twitter Karma!
As with most 3rd party applications, you will need to supply your name and password as Twitter Karma needs to see who’s in your friends/followers list.

You will be able to see who is following you or if are You following them etc. You can also see how long its been since they have tweeted.

If you Pop on down to the bottom you can make your decision:

If you’re looking to drop everyone, do a “check all” and “Bulk Unfollow” and it’ll go through and unfollow them.
If you just want to follow certain ones, then check the boxes.

A bit of warning, this may take some time, so please be patient.  I find the best way to keep up on whether it is working (Because it goes into work mode the instant you click it: Would be to go to your twitter homepage, and watch the numbers increase/decrease appropriately.

One of the nicest parts is it will show you when they “Last Updated” so you can feel better removing people who haven’t updated “Ever” or “not in a year” or so.

2.Friend or Follow!

It’s actually very simple to use but a little tedious.  Simply browse to their site, enter your name hit submit and you’re off!

At that point, you can click on their names and decide if you want to continue following them or not.  It’s a useful way to see who it is that you are following who is not following you.   But the benefits don’t end there!

Simply by clicking on Fans, you’ll get a list of people who are following you, but YOU are not following back!

This happens to the best of us, or they’re spammers which haven’t been removed yet, in either case you can click on them and choose to follow or not!

Here is where it gets tricky.   Let’s say you chose to follow ‘x’ number of folks and they’re not reciprocating, and you decide  to unfollow them, you need to open up each of their profiles. I like some things about this site but it is not my favourite…it can be very tedious.

3. Untweep
This is a very simple site to follow and if you just want to purge your list according to how active some people are on your list, then you can use this site. Not much to it really…

So remember, if you’re looking to mass follow, mass unfollow, or take any kind of mass actions (Or even just get a feeling of how unbalanced things may be)  – The three tools mentioned above will help you achieve that!

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Posted in Social Media

Creating a Twitter Background

July 19th, 2009

When creating your profile for Twitter, you want to be able to give as much information to your followers as possible. Since Twitter only lets you put in minimal information in your BIO, you want to utilize the other space as much as you can

Most of the backgrounds you see with images and information on the left hand side in the background are generally created in an image program such as Gimp or Photoshop, and then uploaded as a background image. The trick in this method is that you have to have the image scaled to fit correctly in the twitter frame on your computer. You need to remember that everyone uses different size screens with different sized pixels. You unfortunately cannot click on any of these links that are displayed in this fashion. People will need to type them into their browser if they want to go to that page.

I have found some other good resources for creating Twitter Backgrounds.

Check these out too:

The Closet Entrepreneur Lets you know how to use PowerPoint to create a background.

Croncast This will give you specs for creating the size of the image as well as other tips

Presentation Zen This gives a great resource guide to getting quality Stock Photos for your Backgrounds

An example of a Twitter profile creted in Gimp

An example of a Twitter profile creted in Gimp

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Posted in Computers, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

Using Twitter Advanced Search

July 15th, 2009

There is a great feature on Twitter that many people dont realise is there and that is the Advanced search. On your Home page of Twitter on the right hand side is a search box that many people use and it will give you only the result that you type in. Instead,  go to the bottom of the page and look for the word ‘search’ in the list along the base of the home page. Once you click on here, you will need to click on Advanced search under neath the text box. this will open up your world of twitter search.

From here, you can search for peoples tweets with certain keywords in them, you can specific phrases and you can also search for tweets that DONT contain certain words. For instance, if you were searching for weight loss and you wanted to find all of the tweets that did NOT contain the words PILLS, DRUGS or SURGERY, then you can do that.

Another great aspect of this search is to find tweets that are in a certain geographic location. You can specify the distance from a suburb/city that you want to see Tweets from.

As well as searching for Tweets from a specified date range , you can also see tweets FROM certain people, TO certain people or ABOUT certain people. This can be great for businesses to keep an eye on their competitors. Just imagine, doing a search last week for all the people that mentioned your competitor , who also resided in your neighborhood. You can then also search to see what your competitor was also sending out to their followers. This way you could easily keep an eye on their business from the comfort of your office.

The other terrific thing about the Advanced Twitter search is that if somebody mentions a particular problem that your business can solve, all you need to do is send them a message about the solution and you could potentially have  valuable customer.

Below, I have posted a video on how to use the Advanced Search feature. Please add comments and let me know what you think of the video

Happy Tweeting searching!

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Posted in Business, Health, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

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