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7 Tools to Increase Social Media Efficiency and Save A Ton of Time

Steinar — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:14:33 +0000

Nearly everyone agrees that social media is a great way to reach and communicate with your market online. Weather it’s through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, direct access to your target market has never been easier. The challenge, of course, is finding the time and resources to make the process efficient and effective. Following is my list of 7 Tools to Increase Social Media Efficiency:

1. Google Reader

This one might not be so obvious, but Google Reader is a great tool for market intelligence and brand management when it comes to social media. Basically, Google Reader allow you to subscribe to the RSS feeds on other websites, blogs, Facebook Pages and Twitter Searches that you want to track or find relevant to your market niche. You can also subscribe to Google Blog or News results containing your name, product or brand. Finally, sign up for BackTweets and track Twitter updates that link to your content.

Now you have a powerful one-stop-shop for getting up to speed on the latest news, trends, and brand mentions in your niche. Now, use this for inspiration in your next blog post, reply to people’s comments about you, and share links with your social network.

Congratulations! You just saved hours a week by setting up a proper system that pushes your content to you!

2. WordPress “Press This”

“Press This” is a often overlooked bookmarklet that comes with every WordPress blog. Essentially, it allows you to highlight text on a website and then easily quote the content in a blog post. So instead of copying and pasting text and links back and forth between a webpage and your WordPress post editor, you can now do it with the single click of a button. This is a huge time saver!!

3. Ping.fm

If you’re like most people using social media today you have accounts on multiple social media networks. Ping.fm allows you to update multiple platforms at once without having to go to each individual account. The beauty of this system is that you have central control over how information is distributed.

For example, when this blog post is published, Ping.fm will automatically send a link to Twitter, Facebook, linkedIn, and Delicious. If at any point I decide to change my distribution strategy all I only have to login to my Ping.fm account and make the changes there. This is much more efficient than re-routing my content on each individual network.

4. Smart Phone (iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, etc)

Today’s smart phones provide users with many of the same capabilities available to them on a laptop or desktop computer. However, most smart phones also have cameras and GPS capabilities that add visual interest and location-based information to your social media updates. The tools are so easy to use that literally within less than 60 seconds you can take a picture of something, tag your location, and update all of your networks with just a few clicks.

To do this from your desktop or laptop computer would take considerably longer and would be virtually impossible to complete using a standard cell phone.

5. TweetDeck or Hootsuite

Tweetdeck and Hootsuite suite are two applications that allow you to control your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn updates from one single location. This is very helpful because you no longer need to log into each individual account to post an update or to see what others have to say. Another great feature of these services is the ability to schedule or timestamp your updates for future release.

For example, if you knew that next week you were going to be announcing a new product, you could schedule your updates over the course of the next few days all at once to correspond with the upcoming product launch. This saves you the time and hassle of manually updating your accounts every day with Marketing copy you already have available now.

6. InstaPaper

InstaPaper is a free and very simple online tool that allows you to save a webpage or article for later reference. Rather than printing the article or saving it to your bookmarks or favorites where he can easily get lost, InstaPaper keeps everything organized and accessible across multiple devices by storing information in the cloud. This is particularly important if you don’t have time to read the article now and/or you would like to reference the article in an upcoming blog post.

For example, I can save something using the InstaPaper bookmarklet on my iMac desktop and it will be instantly available for viewing and sharing within my iPad InstaPaper App. Dozens of third-party applications are supported and the functionality continues to expand, so check out InstaPaper when you get a chance.

7. Posterous

Posterous is a terrific blogging platform of sorts that allows you to easily capture text, images & audio and then share this content across multiple social media networks automatically. The real differentiator is that you can e-mail content to your Posterous account, and it will use a smart filtering process to determine where and how that content is posted on your blog.

For example, you just took a picture on your cellphone and would like to post it to your Posterous account, but you would also like that picture to get posted to your Flickr account at the same time. In this case, you would e-mail your picture from your phone to Flickr@Posterous.com and Posterous would take care of the rest. Again, trying to do this manually would take considerably longer.

There are so many other tools and approaches that you could incorporate into your process to increase your social media efficiency. I hope you learned at least one new idea in this post. What other tools are you using that help make your social media life easier?

More Evidence that Social Media is Critical to Online Business Strategy

Steinar — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:14:33 +0000

I help companies map out their Internet marketing strategies and one component is often the use of social media. A common response is that their customers do not use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. I often argue this point, given the growing numbers and expanding demographics of those using social media.

Currently, three quarters of Internet users worldwide visit a social network or blog when they go online — that’s a 24% increase over last year.

Joe Average (the international version) spends 66% more time on these sites than he did a year ago — for example, your average user spent 6 hours on these sites in April 2010, while last year he spent 3 hours, 31 minutes.

Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia make an appearance among the world’s most popular brands.

via How the World Is Spending Its Time Online [STATS]

If your company is considering social media as a tool to reach your market online, engage with existing customers, or expand your brand to connect with new prospects, I recommend you get started with three platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Facebook is the leading online social network with over 500M users. Facebook Pages are a great way for a business to leverage this volume. Pages can be custom branded to fit within your other online assets and provide an excellent channel to offer a new communications channel to your online community.

Twitter is the leading microblogging platform. Currently Google indexes Twitter content into their “Updates” results and it’s believe to provide future value in how search engines determine webpage rank. In other words, if you’re engaged with customers on Twitter, it’s an indication that your website has value and may have some level of influence over others. There certainly are a number of tracking tools that indicate this is directionally true.

YouTube is owned by Google and is the leading online video sharing site. It provides companies with the opportunity to engage with customers using video rather than static text and images. Statistics suggest that video is more engaging and website visitor retention rates are higher when video is present. Video doesn’t need to be a high production excercise and I recommend you take a more casual, conversational approach with video when using it to speak directly to your customers.

Not convinced yet that social media is right for your company? What’s holding you back?

Record and publish online video with no additional hardware or software with screenr.com

Steinar — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:17:44 +0000

Sharing video content online is something we would all like to do and screenr.com makes it easy. It’s basically a free web app for simple screen casting. It’s great if you want to narrate a powerpoint presentation or share something you’ve found online via video.

Details: Up to 5 minutes, audio recording, download finished video, save or export to YouTube, embed link and custom URL’s for linking. Plus, it’s integrated with Twitter so it’s easy to share with your friends.

Check it out at screenr.com.

Share iPad links on Twitter and Facebook with Ping.fm bookmark in Safari browser

Steinar — Fri, 07 May 2010 23:19:21 +0000

Here’s an easy technique to share iPad Safari browser links on Twitter and Facebook with a Ping.fm bookmark.

One of the most popular tasks in twitter is sharing links with your followers. On a laptop or standard computer this is fairly simple since you can just cut and paste from the browser into your favorite Twitter client, such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.

You can do the same on the iPad but Ping.fm makes the process significantly easier by adding a Ping This bookmark in your iPad Safari bookmarks. I use MobileMe , so the Ping This bookmark is already there from my iMac and Macbook Pro.

What do you think? Easy right?

Audio and Video: How to podcast from your iPad and publish on WordPress with AudioBoo App

Steinar — Tue, 04 May 2010 14:53:20 +0000

The iPad serves many purposes, but for me it’s about marketing and finding new and different ways to leverage mobile technology to grow my business and engage my market online. New media has been especially interesting and I’ve confirmed the iPad is great for recording audio to create podcast episodes which can translate into new WordPress blog posts.

Listen or Download

I’ve written previous posts on how to post audio directly to WordPress from iPhone, so I won’t repeat everything here.

I love using my iPhone to podcast with AudioBoo and now I can do the same with my iPad. It’s a a great free app from the Apple iTunes store that allows you to record up to 5 minutes of audio, share on Twitter and tag for use in other platforms.

Personally, I use the AudioBoo RSS feed and WP-O-Matic WordPress plugin to automatically import my audio episodes into WordPress as individual posts. It’s great when you want to get content out on the fly and don’t necessarily have time to write a post or record a video.

What do you think? Have you tried AudioBoo? Does it seem like a good fit for your audience?

What

Find Balance in Your Social Media Communications Strategy for a More Rewarding Experience

Steinar — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:36:05 +0000

Clients often ask me what they should tweet about once I set them up on Twitter. It’s a valid question, given that most new Twitter users shut down only days after getting started. The fact is, most of us are not wired to opening talk to strangers and find the fear of criticism paralyzing. We’re all victim to this at some degree.

Hopefully, the following 3 components will help get your head around how to approach your social media communications strategy. Start with the component that feels most comfortable and grow from there to create a complete picture of yourself for others to follow.

3 Essential Content Types for Effective Social Media Communication

Talk about …

Yourself – this gives your readers some clue about you as a person. People like to talk with people so make sure to inject a little about your personality, hobbies and daily life.
Your company, product or services – at the end of the day, if your goal is to sell something, find new customers, or engage with existing customers you must talk about what you have to offer. This is basic, but is a must.
Your industry or community – social media is about community so get involved. Something happening in town you think others might find interesting – share it with your followers? Developing news in your industry? Serve as the go-to-person within your niche for the latest news and share information as it comes across your desk.

WARNING: do only one of these three things and you risk turning people off.

Only talk about yourself and people will get bored or even annoyed.
Only talk about your company and you’ll come across as a pushy salesperson.
Only talk about your community or industry and you’ll just be a news source.

The trick is to have a balanced approach that provides your followers with a complete picture of you as a person, member of the community and provider of valuable products and services.

What do you think? Does this make sense as an approach to execute your social media communications strategy?

Use Safari, MobileMe and Ping.fm to share browser bookmarks and content across iMac, iPhone and iPad

Steinar — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:53:45 +0000

Here’s a quick video to illustrate how I use Safari, MobileMe and Ping.fm to share browser bookmarks and content across my iMac, iPhone and iPad.

Why do I take this approach?

MobileMe syncs Safari bookmarks across any Apple device you setup with MobileMe and Safari
Safari is a great browser - fast, reliable, and compliant with most of the latest website components
I constantly switch between devices and need consistent access to the same bookmarks
Ping.fm allows you to centrally manage how you share and distribute content. Rather than setting up share controls in individual applications like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I prefer to centrally control the content from my blog and use Ping.fm to handle the distribution.

What do you think? Do you see value in using Safari, MobileMe and Ping.fm to share browser bookmarks and content across multiple Apple devices?

PS – here’s how I made that finger cursor mouse on my Mac

Finding your Rhythm for Blogging, Social Media and Engaging Customers Online

Steinar — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:38:51 +0000

Whether you are new to blogging and social media or have been at it for a while, finding your rhythm can be a challenge and something that requires continuous improvement. This is especially true as the tools and platforms change in relation to your marketing strategy for engaging customers online.

This is my 100th post on this blog, so I thought it would be fitting to review my daily process. Let’s start with my goals.

My blogging and social media goals:

Stay informed of the latest news, trends and topics within my niche
Connect with other marketers, customers, and folks I find interesting
Share my thoughts and those of others with my network
Deliver valuable content to build my network, engage my market and grow my business online

Daily blogging, social media, and market engagement process:

I use Google Reader to find the latest news and keep my finger on the pulse of what happening within my niche. I subscribe to dozens of news sources, popular blogs and Google searches to find relevant articles, with which I can share, comment on, or use as inspiration for my next blog post. I usually check Google Reader 2-3 times a day for 5 minutes each and complete 1-2 actions as a result.
I use this blog as the main source for content creation and distribution. Creating content on my own domain allows me to maintain full control. Sure I post information on Facebook and Twitter, but anything with substantial content resides on my blog. I publish new posts every 1-2 days.
I use the WordPress ping.fm plugin to automatically share my blog RSS feed with Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and a few other popular social media and bookmarking sites. Again, this allows me to maintain control rather than setting up 3rd party sites to receive my RSS feed. If I ever want to turn off my stream, I can control this from one central dashboard in ping.fm. Not everything flows through ping.fm – only content that I want to share with my entire network.
My iPhone is my Internet Marketing Remote Control. I can manage Twitter, check Google Reader, update WordPress posts, reply to comments on my blog, check in with Facebook friends and fans, snap images and record & publish podcast episodes from my iPhone with the click of a button. Of course, I can also use email and talk on the phone.
At night, I like to use Google Reader to answer questions on Twitter from people looking for help. I have several dozen search queries set up and RSS feeds organized in Google Reader to make this simple. Answering people’s questions on Twitter allows my to meet new people, learn something new, and share content I find helpful.

Keys to Success with Blogging and Social Media

The keys to successfull blogging and social media vary, depending on your particular situation. Here are a few things I find helpful:

Write original content. It’s OK to quote others, but the majority of your content should be original.
Find a frequency of engagement that suits you and be consistent.
Reply to comments, messages, and mentions quickly.
Write as if you were talking with your reader, but keep search engine optimization in mind.
Proactively promote your content by leveraging your RSS feed and providing links for people to find you.
Have a content creation strategy to help define what you will talk about and how that unfolds over time.

I hope you find this helpful as you continue to define or improve your process for blogging and engaging your market online through social media.

Any thoughts? What tools and process do you follow to increase your efficiency and effectiveness?

4 ways to use Google Reader to track your industry, engage your market and monitor your brand

Steinar — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:54:27 +0000

As many know, Google Reader is one of my favorite tools to help establish yourself as a market leader online. In this audio post I discuss the 4 ways Google Reader can help you track your industry, engage your market and monitor your brand.

Listen or Download

Four advantages of Google Reader

Ability to track your industry by subscribing to popular blogs or RSS feeds that contain the latest news, trends and product information
Ability to share information with your social network via share button, shared custom Google Reader RSS feed or email link
Ability to save searches from Twitter to easily identify opportunity to engage with people asking for help on topics you understand
Ability to track mentions of you, your company, your brand or your products and service so you can jump in the conversation early and often.

How do you use Google Reader? What other online tools do you use to accomplish these or similar tasks?

What does your Twitter psychological profile say about you?

Steinar — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:12:34 +0000

I have been doing some research on tools to analyze customer sentiment on social media networks and ran across TweetPsych which maps your psychological profile versus other Twitter users.

My results are pretty accurate based on my interests, work, and stream of content I share on Twitter. I’m most interested in Internet marketing, SEO, and new media and specialize in consulting, teaching and generally helping others learn how to leverage the Internet to grow their business. This comes accross clearly when you look at the TweetPsych analysis.

Visit TweetPsych to view your profile.

What do you think? Do you find it useful have this kind of Twitter psychological profile information?