Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

How To Send Facebook Page Updates

Monday, 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

Saturday, 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

Using News Feeds and Status Updates on Facebook

Thursday, 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

Creating a Twitter Background

Sunday, 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

Wednesday, 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

Michael Jackson nearly Broke Twitter

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

It took Michael Jackson’s death to really show us the power of Social media today and how it is really affecting the way we get our information. We I first heard the news, it was via a tweet from some I did not know. At that time, I had access to a radio which was saying that he had been taken to hospital for observation. I then lost my radio access and had no TV access either so relied fully on Internet.

As the news came filtering out, I could see the growing swell of information pertaining to MJ’s death from Twitter and Facebook but the official sites such as CNN and ABC were still not saying that he had died, yet it was all over the social media circles as official.

I guess the thing about the instant notifications of social media is that there are so many people with so many ‘news’ connections that when a tweet or status update is posted, it often contains a link to the relevant site of where that information came from. So instead of me doing my usual search of the ‘official ‘ TV sites and News sites where ALL of them were not being updated as quickly as Twitter, I just needed to watch the twitter / Facebook time line and click on any of those links that I wanted to follow.

According to Tweespeed , There are approximately 400,000 to 800,000 tweets per hour on an average day. When news broke of Michael Jackson’s Death, this figure went to approx 1.2 million tweets per hour. This is staggering. Twitter are now saying that in the hours leading up to his death and the hours that followed, 30% of tweets contained the words Michael Jackson. Nearly all social media sites, including Twitter,  reported a large slow down in their server speed because of the Death.

Youtube and all of the video sharing networks have not been left out either.

Michael Jackson’s online popularity continues to soar: Mashable reported previously that 2.6 million songs  from Michael Jackson were downloaded this week;Apparently, no artist has downloaded more than 1 million songs in a week!

Videos of Thriller ( original or tribute variety) have been viewed almost 28 million times since his death.

Michael Jackson, it seems, is getting more popular by the day.

Below is one of the most popular videos on Youtube…now it is even more popular. A prison tribute to Michael Jackson

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Posted in Entertainment, Facebook, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Youtube

Selling the benefit of social media to the non-believers

Friday, June 26th, 2009

social-networks-logosI have had a few people ask me recently about the benefit of social media and what do i say to people who just cant get into it.I believe that there are a number of benefits that need to be made clear to the people who are still unsure about the great benefits of social media and social Networking. Firstly, have a look at the sheer numbers of people using these sites (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc) According to Alexa , (the foremost authority on web use and trends) Facebook is just about to take over the number 3 spot (behind Google-no 1 and Yahoo- no 2) from  Youtube.

Twitter currently sits at number 27 and is growing rapidly. Now these figures represent a massive growth in companies using these applications for marketing and other business reasons.

The fact that Twitter and Facebook have opened up their applications to 3rd party developers means that people are developing applicaions that suits all types of requirements. Apart form business applications, there are many useful things that these social sites can be used for: Keeping updated on news and events. from friends and family, and also a point that many don’t realise and that is these sites can be used as the best feedback and information booth ever.

Lets say that you need an answer about some current event or trend that is taking place now or in the past few days, you can type your question on Facebook or Twitter and you will get an instant response. If you typed the same question on Google, sure you will get results, but those results will not necessarily be current. Your results may go back in time for several years..not much good if your looking for current trends or want to find the latest sports score! All you need to do is type a question that you need answered and watch the responses flow in, work needed by you to source the answers is very minimal.

The other major bonus is that all of this is absolutely free. The majority of the 3rd party applications are free to, so what have you got to lose?

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Posted in Business, Computers, Facebook, Health, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Youtube

Should I Be Using Social Networking to Promote My Business?

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

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The aim of most business owners is to make money. This often results with the selling of a particular product or service. However, to sell that product or service, business owners need to get customers in the door, or at least to their web page. If you don’t let people know that you are there, how can you sell them anything? As a dear friend of mine used to say, ‘ You can’t sell a secret’ Customers cannot buy a product or a service if they don’t know it even exists.

Although social networking websites are commonly thought of as ones that people only make online friends or share what they had for lunch, there are networking sites that are designed for business owners. These websites (such as LinkedIn) will not only allow you to share your business information with other business owners, but will also allow you to develop close relationships with those that share an interest that is similar to yours. These days, the traditional ‘friends only’ websites (Facebook, twitter and MySpace) are now becoming big fish in the world of business marketing Essentially, this means that you could not only learn valuable business information, but you could also walk away with a new business partner or several new loyal customers.

Social networking sites that are not created to target business owners can be leveraged successfully because of the simple fact that large numbers of people visit these sites each day, and people love to buy stuff! By large numbers, I mean that Facebook now has over 200million active users, predicted to be 500 million by 2011 and Twitter is growing at an alarming rate. It alone grew by 640% in 2008!

So should you be using social networking to promote my business? It’s all really a simple matter of just getting involved and attracting to you the people who have an interest in the information, products, or services you want to share with them. If you haven’t already done so, take the very simple and easy step and sign up today…

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Posted in Academics, Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Youtube

What the Hell is Social Networking?

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Social Networking is basically the regular interaction of people with a common outlook or purpose. These days there is really nothing new about this phenomenon, and it’s something many of us have been doing everyday since we could speak, especially in schools or in the workplace. But as a marketing concept, this trend is growing more and more popular online everyday.

Unlike most high Schools, Universities, or Workplaces, the Internet is filled with millions of people who are searching to meet other online users and develop business and personal contacts and relationships.

There are many ways to conduct social networking on the web. Social networking websites are pretty much groups of Internet users that can range from tiny and closely focused portals to massive groups of people who all have different interests and varying backgrounds.

So a social networking site can be prominent on the basis of topics from hobbies, common interests, education, Business Ideas, or Political standpoints. And the reason behind getting involved in these websites is to meet new people who fit into one of two categories:

•    People who have something you need.

•    People who need something you have.

Of course  there is a lot more to it than this simple idea but the above two categories basically wrap up the entire purpose of joining in on the social networking craze. You might be looking for someone with the missing coin in your rare coin collection, or you could be searching for new business contacts to grow your business to the next level.

The aim of my website and Blog is to introduce you to new and FUN ways to utilize some of the tools to grow your business using Social media , in an easy and relaxed way without the heavy jargon. There will be plenty of ‘how to’ videos and heaps of cool tips for all levels of experience.

Whatever your reasons are, the most important thing to do is to just get started and join in. Sign up to some free social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube and begin finding out what it all about. Anyone can become a member, no matter what their hobbies, beliefs, or views are. However, once you are inside these online communities, you can begin to create your own network of friends.

Check out the profiles or profile pages of other members, and even start contacting the people who share common interests and aspirations as you. Since networking sites exist for the sole purpose of meeting and communicating with people from all walks of life, the majority of folks who visit these sites are more than happy to meet and communicate with you! You can always start with me……( click on links at top of page)

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Posted in Business, Computers, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Youtube