Online Marketing Tips - SEO Tricks, PPC, Email Marketing Tips Blog » Social Media Tips

Few Web Insights – eMarketinGuide.com

Ankush Kohli — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:30:09 +0000

Outlook Social Connect - Microsoft has struck deals with LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace that will bring your disparate networks of friends and colleagues to Outlook. It’ll give you power to bring status updates and user photos to your e-mail.
Search any specific folder in Gmail: As you search spam, you can also search any particular folder in your Gmail. For e.g. if you want to search only in drafts then use “in:Drafts (keyword)”. It’ll only give the search results from drafts folder.
Gmail adoption is growing faster internationally than in the U.S., Reinstein said on 14th March’10 in SXSW Interactive. He said, Gmail holds the top spot in email usage in India at the moment.
New Gmail Etacts plugin - This Etacts plug-in automatically adds detailed contact information to the sidebar of messages. You not only get links to any social networks that contact is a part of, and some of the information contained therein (such as their occupation and location), but you also get a detailed summary of your mailing history with them, complete with nice little graphs and charts as well. All this information is also available in compose mode as well, so you know exactly who you’re sending it to. Screen-shots & installation.
Linkedin Company Buzz Application: Under “More…” link, choose “Application Directory” & select “Company Buzz” tool that allow you to discover relevant trends and comments about your company from Twitter. The tool lets you customize/modify the topics to watch and displays charts to track activity.
Twitter introduced @anywhere, a tool to better connect third party sites to related Tweets. See here: http://twitter.com/anywhere
WordPress 2.9+ comes with recycle bin feature: Any post which gets deleted intentionally or accidentally by the users can be retrieved and restored from the trash area. The posts remain in the recycle bin for a default period of 30 days and get removed permanently there after. With WordPress 2.9 the users can also edit the wp-config.php file and have the option to control the trash bin.
Wikipedia.org is the No. 1 website in the race of organic traffic with 15,421,396 keywords however Google.com is receiving traffic only from 3,993,082. Source: semrush.
Track Facebook Fan Pages with Google Analytics. See here: webdigi
Useful Firefox Shortcuts, help you to increase productivity -
- Ctrl + 1 = select leftmost tab
- Ctrl + 2-8 = select open taba in their order from left to right
- Ctrl + 9 = Choose rightmost tab
- Ctrl + T = Opens new tab
- Ctrl + Tab = Select next tab in active window
- Ctrl + Shift + Tab = Select previous tab in active window
- Ctrl + Shift + T = Undo close tab
- Ctrl + F4/W = To close active window

How to Plan Social Media Marketing Strategy

Ankush Kohli — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:39:39 +0000

Few of my friends, who were looking for job change, got many calls for interview. Most of time, interviewer’s main query was regarding “Social Media”. Below mentioned are the major questions they’ve asked for:

How to create social media marketing campaign?
What’s the plan & strategy behind social media?
What are the activities you’re going to do?
What the goals are?
How much time you’ll spend and time to display the results?
How you’ll measure the results and what will be the expected results?
And what are the risks behind Social Media?

So I thought to write my next post about “Designing Social Media Marketing Plan”. Here’s the post content, start with “Why” word:

Why Social Media:

The most effective way of getting users attention OR To reach online people.
People tend to take part in online conversations and are happy to communicate with brands.
The information found on the Social Web can be genuinely interesting and quite informative when applied to a business.

Social Media Marketing Plan Steps:

Start with the Goals
Do research to Design the Strategy
Take a Call on “Actual path”
Put into Practice
Result Measurements
Risks
KPI (Key Performance Indicators)

1. Start with the Goals:

Increase brand awareness
Build authority
Learn more about your target audience
Gain inbound links
Educate and inform customers
Improve customer service
Monitor brand reputation
Reach new channels of customers.
Customers Testimonials
Direct connection between customer & the company
Generate leads & drive sales.

2. Create a Strategy Based on Research:

Determining if your target audience is online
Examining the successes and failures of other social media campaigns
Creating realistic timelines
How to measure the results

3. Actual path:

Building Relationships
Creating a Schedule
Staying the Course
Measuring the Results
Making the Right Tweaks

Now, it’s time implement all the plans. In simple terms, you need to adapt below mentioned practical steps:

4. Put into Practices: Mix of content you intend to create, and build work flow around it.

a) Methods:

Write/Read a blog
Share a Photo, Video
Bookmark a WebPage
Post a Question OR Start a Poll
Give replies to asked questions OR participate into other’s Poll
Add a Comment
Write a review
Subscribe to a Website
Being everyone, not only in your own domain

b) Community:Most social media strategies have to address community and how you will embrace the people you seek to gather around your business.

c) Neighbors:Reach out to others in your community, comment, and share.

d) Attention:Build awareness and encourage relationships with the media you’re making.

e) Pay attention and participate in the networks whose audience matters to you in the context of your business objectives. Don’t waste time in the networks that fail either test.

5. Measurement:

Reader comments
RSS Subscribers
Twitter Followers
Facebook Fans
Click Throughs
Diggs
Stumbles
Podcast Subscribers
Search Results
Links
Impressions
And last but not the least Analytics.

6. Risks:

You might lose control.
People talk about you in a bad way.

7. KPI: To know the “performance metrics” in a simple way, I’ve named them as KPI and terms are:

Traffic
Links
& Branding.

I’m expecting huge comments like my other posts about this social plan, please feel free to post your queries, feedback & suggestions.

Read Twitter Marketing Plan, Strategy & Tips.

Google & Facebook Shorten URL Service

Ankush Kohli — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:07:49 +0000

It’s Shorten URL’s season. First Facebook and then Google launched their own URL shorten service. Facebook shorten URL is fb.me and Google is Goo.gl.

Facebook’s fb.me service will allow you to shorten any link on the site – even if you just want to trim down the path to a specific profile page (http://fb.me/ankush.kohli). No mention of whether or not they plan on providing an API for third-party developers to integrate the service.

Google announce this news through Official blog post says their service is not a standalone offering – at least for now. As this is not new so they’re giving rights to use this service only through Google Toolbar or Feedburner. You can’t use it to shorten links directly.

You can also setup your own URL Redirection service with Google Short Links. Check out the Labnol post for setting up your service.

Expecting huge comments. Questions… Query… Feedback..

Top Twitter Tips and Tricks

Ankush Kohli — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:37:43 +0000

There are lot of twitter tips already in the market. You can find various tricks in eBooks, blogs & websites so why you’re here because I bet that you’ll never found all these “Working” twitter tips at one place. Here I’m giving you the proper guidance on how to start your twitter account, how to increase followers quickly, the best way to tweet, promotion of your twitter account and a sound list of twitter tools that will save your time.

Promote Your Twitter Account:

Fill out your bio. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
Treat your twitter profile as you would treat any other website. Send as much traffic as possible to your twitter profile.
Use a “tweet this” button above/below all your articles which you think can go viral in twitter world.
Add your name to twitter directories like: tweeps.pbwiki.com, justtweetit.com etc.
Add twitter apps in your Facebook account that can send your tweets automatically to your Facebook profile.
Link your twitter profile with your Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blog etc.
Use your twitter profile as email signature, forum signature and everywhere else you live online.
Add yourself into more & more Twitter Lists.
Bring your twitter account into the physical world. Broadcast your twitter account everywhere like in seminar, webinar, business card etc.
Customized your twitter background. Use pic which is relevant to your nature/business.
Set “auto welcome message” when someone start following you.
Use your twitter profile URL while commenting on other blogs.
Apply your real photo or your blog logo/banner on your twitter profile.
Ask other twitter members to recommend you to their followers and you can recommend them to your followers.
If you have good followers say 500+, you can display it on your blog as a widget/badge.
Try to be more active on weekdays because on weekends, people enjoy their weekends & don’t care much.
Participate in certain groups. Groups can be created using hashtags. And sometimes if the group message is a hot topic, then your tweets will be listed in “hot trending topics” in search or other famous twitter services. Ex:- #followfriday
Bring your topic into top 10 Trending Topics.

Tips About Tweets & Posts:

Be active on twitter through different types of posts.
Tweet valuable things. Don’t just try to get traffic to your blog by tweeting only about your articles. Mix your tweets with friendly content.
Tweet about your passion in life and use #hash tag them.
Every tweet should be independent. It shouldn’t depend on previous or any other tweet.
Try to show the main things within first 32 characters as only they’re visible firstly until & unless s/he is your favorite friend or must following u. Persons, who are online through devices can’t able to see more than 32 characters at first.
Post your Digg story into twitter as new status http://twiggit.org
Keep space between 2 links within your tweet. For e.g. during replying to some post if 2 links occur and they’re more closer than there are less chances of clicking these.
Save your time by configure your blog RSS feed into http://friendfeed.com. Friendfeed submit new posts automatically to your twitter account.
When you tweet something worth Re-tweeting, then use less than 140 Characters. Because, if your twitter ID has 5 characters, then a re-tweet will add a @ “a symbol” and “RT:” thus making a total of 140+1+3+5=149 characters. So use 125 or 130 characters.
Tweeting link of some good pictures and breaking news get viral most of the times. You can also tweet about a new job or event.
Asking questions – By asking questions, you can easily start the conversation with any stranger. May be they’ll follow u.

Twitter Tools:

Friend or Follow – Friend or Follow helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter.
Qwitter – Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).
GroupTweet – Create private groups to communicate with your group members alone by sending the tweet as a direct message to the group tweet account. That will convert the DM back to tweet and publishes only for the group users. Private communication is established through this way.
Tweetmeme – Displays popular topics on Twitter and those people talking about that topic.
TweetBeep – Just like Google Alerts, this service will send you an alert whenever your set keyword is mentioned on Twitter or when somebody link to your site.
TwitterCounter – With this plugin, you can display the number of followers you have on Twitter.
Socialoomph – You can send auto direct messages, follow those who follow you, unfollow those who stop following you. You can manage multiple accounts and you know everything the biggest thing is it’s free.
Mrtweet – Find folks who are highly relevant. Add value to awesome people – recommend them. Be found by people who are naturally relevant to you.
Ping.fm – This service will update all of your social networks at once.
Twitterless – Get notified when someone stops following you with Twitterless.
TwitResponse – TwitResponse makes it easy for you to schedule the delivery of your tweets ahead of time.
MyCleenr – Sort your friends by their last tweets, and you can get rid of the inactive and useless accounts you’re following.
Tweetwasters – Find out how much time you and other users waste on Twitter.
2tweet – Tweet photos and videos by email
FutureTweets – Schedule your Tweets.
TwitPic – Share photos on Twitter – Share photos with your friends on twitter with twitpic. No signup required, just login using your twitter account
TweetWheel – Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other! – Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other.
TwitBacks – Free Twitter Backgrounds – Create your own Twitter background with your branding – Free
TwitterFone – Send Messages to Twitter with Voice – Send messages to Twitter using voice!
Twollow – Auto Follow On Twitter –
Who Should I Follow – Twitter Friend Recommendations | Who Should i Follow? – WhoShouldiFollow recommends people to follow on Twitter.

How to Increase Your Followers:

Search & invite people which have same profile like you.
Search and invite people which have huge followers.
Ping your twitter account through ping.fm.
Find your mutual friends, followers, followings etc from various twitter tools.
Unfollow those who stop following you.
If you have a website or a blog, display the follow me button at the top or any other highly visible space.
Invite all friends of your Gmail, Yahoo mail etc as they are the most potential followers you can ever get.
Follow others users. If you do not follow others and keep expecting lot of people to start following you, this will not work.
Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.

Bulk Follow Tools:

Twellow – Find Twitter users in a specific industry using this service.
Twitseeker – An alternate search engine for finding twitter.com users. Many of the favorite but not mine. Also, this tool is currently blocked by Twitter as per the violation of terms. It find users basis on the search terms and users tweets/profiles and you can follow all those searched users in bulk.
Buzzom – This is one of my favorite tool for bulk followers. What it does:
- Search other twitter members on the basis of your profile.
- Select & deselect users.
- Bulk follow & unfollow users.
- It also shows the number of followers & followings of other users.
Buzzom was the perfect tool for bulk followers but since 1 Jan’2010 they’ve changed the site layout & remove the bulk follow service. May be, they’ve added this features in paid one. In the free service, they’ve both features but you can’t use both features simultaneously.
Tweepi – (“Select All” feature is disabled on 28th january as per “Twitter TOS”) I’ve searched a new tool for getting huge followers. It’s a good tool to attract huge followers within minutes . Now the procedure to use:
- Find a twitterer, who’s having similar profile like you
- Login into tweepi with your account.
- Now you can follow other twitterer friends within minute.
Refollow (Now My Favorite) – Free, superb tool for bulk follow & unfollow feature & lots of other creative features like:
- Find twitterers, whom you’re following but they’re not following you.
- Find twitterers, who are following you but you’re not following.
- Find friends whom you didn’t follow previously.
- Have or don’t have pictures on their profile.
- When they last tweet.
- Number of days since they last tweet
- See number of followers.
- See number of friends.
- Locked & Unlocked twitterers.
- Can set the filters like search for any term or exclude any term.
- & many others features.

Other Twitter Hacks:

If you’re listed on any unwanted list. Obviously you don’t want to stay there so how to remove yourself from that list. Block that user (which is the owner of the list) and then unblock him/her. You will not show up on their list anymore.
@myflightinfo: Use @myflightinfo to stay updated on your flight’s status.

These are the tips as of today however will post more in my next write-up. Warm welcome for your query or suggestion. Till then enjoy Reading…