Outsource My Social Media Marketing

Most social media websites give you an individual profile page alongside the option of befriending other site users. The adding of someone as a ‘friend’ on a social media website is not just an empty gesture. Usually when you add someone as a friend, you’re giving them greater access to you through the social media channel.

For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.

In sites like Facebook, adding someone as a friend allows them to see more of your profile (depending on your settings). Befriending users on Youtube allows you to follow their rating and favoriting on videos, while also allowing you to more easily share content with one another.

In general, when someone adds you as a friend on a social media service, you gain some or all of the following benefits:

1. Access to more data. You get to view more data on the user, some of which may be intentionally obscured from the public or other non-friend users. This allows you to network with the specific user in a more intimate and personal setting.
2. Greater communication options. Depending on the social site, when someone adds you as a friend, they open up more avenues of communication. This adds a greater level of interactivity: you can connect with the person who added you through private/direct messages, instead of the highly visible public channel.
3. Recommended content. When someone adds you as a friend (and vice versa), your activity or actions on the site may be recommended or ‘pushed’ towards the other person in some part of their admin panel or profile. This means that you’ll get greater visibility automatically whenever you use the social website.
4. Greater Social Proof. An auxiliary advantage of having many fans on social media websites is social proof, especially when the social site itself ranks the users according to the no. of followers/subscribers they have. Popular and visible users tend to accumulate friends more easily than unknown users.

Basically, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain when someone adds you as a friend on any social media website. They are giving you permission to share messages with them while bestowing attention on your recommendations/actions within the social site.

If you’re trying to get maximum visibility for your message, develop a popular social profile that has a large amount of fans in order to take advantage of the innate advantage that comes from communicating with a large number of people at once through a specific action.

You can see this most easily in highly subscribed Youtube channels. A video can easily rack up over 10,000 views in one day if it is released by a highly subscribed channel owner. Similarly, marketers or web personalities enjoy increasing their Twitter fanbase because they benefit from the influence they derive from consistently wielding a large amount of attention.

Are There Benefits to Having Mutual Friends on Social Websites?

Image Credit: mario party

Depending on their level of particpation, some of these users will become part of your inner circle: the people you interact with the most on the social site. You’ll notice that you’re often talking to the same people on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook. More erratic or non-regular users will connect with you less, only when they use the site.

This brings to mind something that is rarely discussed by social media marketers. Are there benefits to mutual friendship on social media websites? Should you only befriend people who befriend you and make sure that you only have mutual friends?

There’s no simple answer for this question because it depends on two things: The infrastructure of the social media site and your goals or how you want to use the site.

Let’s use StumbleUpon as an example. Some have suggested that it’s important to only have mutual friends on StumbleUpon since there’s a friend limit of 200 users. I think that’s just a really limited perspective on how to develop popularity on StumbleUpon.

I don’t recommend this strategy because the only feature-based benefit that you’ll get from a mutual SU friendship is the use of the send-to feature on the toolbar. This option is not used by most active users, does not help to increase traffic significantly and is liable to be abused by spammers who send you multiple pages of content irrelevant to your interests every day.

Who you befriend on Stumbleupon influences what pages you see when you click the stumble button: this means you should try to add users who often stumble content within your field of interest, in order to improve your user-experience, regardless if they are friends or not.

What one needs to understand is that friend networks serve different purposes on each social media site so the value of mutual friendships will differ. This is something you’ll instinctively realize when you spend a lot of time on using each specific social channel.

Next week, I may talk about some friend network building strategies you can use. Feel free to leave a comment and pose any questions you may have!

Business executives have big plans on where they’ll be putting their budget dollars in 2010. According to a new survey by StrongMail, business executives plan to push their new budgets toward email marketing (69% respondents), social media (59% respondents), and SEO (42% respondents).

Even though email and social media integration is a trend that has been growing for some time now, the chart below absolutely confirms the vast room for improvement and growth.

While nearly half of respondents have formulated (or integrated) a strategy that incorporates social media into their company’s email campaigns already, 18% of respondents who have yet to implement an integrated email & social media strategy say they’d like to, but have no idea where to start.

Interestingly, out of the 27% of respondents who claim to have already integrated social media into their email marketing strategy, thirty-five percent are reporting no improvement in their campaign performance. Even more shocking is that 23% of companies currently using social media in their email campaigns still do not know how to measure their results.

Quick Tips on How to Measure Integrated Email & Social Media Campaigns

The data that I find most disturbing is the number of worldwide companies who are implementing social media campaigns without clear ideas on how to measure their results.

Use a “Tweet It” Button and Measure the Clicks and Distance Your Tweet Travels

One way you can track qualitative results is by using a “Tweet It” button in your emails. You can set your “Tweet It” button’s pre-prepared text. This is the lazy-tweet that your twitterers can share with their network. By searching for the text of this pre-prepared text on Twitter Search or other tools, you can see how far your text has traveled. You can also measure the success of this button using quantitative metrics (supplied by your email provider) that report how many people have clicked on the “Tweet It” button.

Monitor Shared Links with a Bit.ly Account

You can also measure the success of your social media campaign by creating a Bit.ly account. Bit.ly is a free link shortener that can help you track how many times people have shared your link via Twitter and other social networks. Place your Bit.ly links in the pre-prepared text of your “Tweet It” Button.

Use Analytics Provided By Your Email Provider

Any email service provider will track clicks for you, too – so you can see how many people click on your social media buttons on your email. This way you’ll be able to discover which Social Media sites you want to incorporate into your emails and where they most like to share your information online.

It seems that over the course of the entire year, we’ve been waiting for Google to get real-time search. Now it’s here. If you have ever had a hard time finding a direct relationship between social media and search engine marketing, it doesn’t get any more direct than this. Real-time search results (from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other sources) right in regular SERPs.

Do you like the idea of real-time results in Google SERPs? Discuss here.

While “real-time search” has certainly been a buzzword this year, the concept itself has been around for a while longer in some capacity. Sure, the concept of searching Twitter has been around for quite some time now, but even as far as Google is concerned, freshness has been a factor of great interest.

“Google has been working on real-time search for years,” as Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb points out. “In the spring of 2006, the story goes, Google launched Google Finance onto the Web and was promptly dismayed to find that the service didn’t appear in a Google search for its own name later that day. It was after that, and a few other similar experiences, that Google engineers created an algorithm called QDF, or Query Deserves Freshness. QDF determines when results for a query need to be augmented with the newest content available, in addition to the content with the highest PageRank.”

“Search users are utilizing results that show up because of it everyday,” says Dave Snyder at Search Engine Journal. “However, in terms of rankings QDF can have huge impacts on the SERPs. The first thing that came to mind when I saw the real time search data pouring through was that Google is getting a massive amount of real time link data without the issue of a crawl. I am convinced they will be utilizing this data to help shape SERPs for terms that are trending or based on timeliness.”

The Potential for Abuse

Snyder also makes a good point about spam. “Seriously, any new feature that Google rolls out is a playground for SPAM,” he says. “My head is spinning thinking of all the cool/evil implications of the service. I am sure lots of people are going to be testing how Google is choosing the results coming in the box. Some people might ask the importance of coming up for a mere moment in that position, but the sheer amount of traffic generated for a trending term can make even a 30 second window profitable.”

The nature or real-time search reults showing content as it is created leads to questions of accuracy of content as well. It does bring up questions about Google showing results that are quite possibly just inaccurate, but in a prominent place on the first page. Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer told TechCrunch that she uses real-time search a lot, and that she trusts the content “most of the time, even if they’re public and not coming from friends.” Do you trust the content? Comment here.

When asked whether or not she thinks Google can solve the problems of filtering, the virality of rumors (true or false), and mob-forming in real-time search, she said, “Hard to say. We can’t simply apply the PageRank algorithm to content shared in real time, but we look at the ecosystem and detect signals we can use to reveal authority, for instance. It’s difficult, but there are data points out there that can be used for filtering.”

Will Real-Time Search Results Drive PPC?

Much like with Google’s recently launched (for everyone) personalized search results, or any other universal search results for that matter, the addition of real-time results is just one more element that can add to the challenge of getting organic results to show up high on the page. As iEntry CEO and WebProNews Publisher Rich Ord noted when talking about personalized search, this could give marketers more cause to focus on PPC, where they have more control over their campaign. This notion seems to be becoming a more common theme.

“I certainly think this will have a more profound impact on results sitting below the Twitter feed and those above,” says Peter Young of Holistic Search, as quoted by MediaPost. “The scramble for the top positions will become fiercer. That may mean more people invest in PPC to gain more control of their presence.”

I probably don’t have to tell you that many businesses are still struggling with the concept of using social media. Many simply can’t find a good reason to use it at all, and many more find themselves using it but struggling to validate that use. They can’t find the ROI. They feel that too much time is being wasted. Basically, they’re just using social networks because they feel like they’re supposed to. They just want to keep up.

Many businesses are even banning social media from the workplace entirely. In fact, a great deal of our readers have expressed that they feel that social media doesn’t belong in the workplace because employees are there to “work,” not “goof off.”

Well, that may be the case, and perhaps social media doesn’t fit into your business at all, but considering your general business goals can help you decide whether or not there is a place for social media, and whether or not your employees can fit into that puzzle.

As social media enthusiast Chris Brogan told WebProNews in a recent interview, it’s time to get over the touristy part of social media and start getting down to business.

He says it’s not “Gee whiz, it’s cool” anymore. It’s “What are we gonna do with it?”

“Great you can type. Now what?” he says.

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