The Confident Copywriter

Posts Tagged ‘social media marketing’

The Twittersphere was aflutter this week as Bueda (a web startup utilizing research from Carnegie Mellon University) released its new social media marketing (SMM) tool, Five. Designed to help small businesses utilize behavioral targeting and semantics for more targeted SMM, Bueda claims it can “match” you with prospects, stating that early testing of Five shows a 90 percent click-through rate by targeted consumers. The website states, “Five is a smarter social promotion tool that can accomplish 5 hours worth of promotion in 5 minutes.”

What Is It?

Essentially, Five relies on a ‘semantics-based’ search engine (semantics is the study of meaning in language). Programmed to decipher the meanings and relationships between terms, Bueda understands, for example, that if you type in ‘health insurance’ and someone else types in ‘medical policy’, you’re both searching the same topic.

This is very similar to the latent semantic indexing method we discussed here on the Confident Copywriter back in June. It is also very similar to the software recently launched by one of my clients, Ucquence (“Uncover the sequence of keywords that convert.”)

5 Steps to Getting Started on Five:

• Go to www.FiveByBueda.com and register.
• Authorize your Twitter account.
• You will be directed to your first campaign.
• Type in the URL of your website or the site you want to promote (customize tags and add advanced options if you like)
• Wait. Five will start working immediately and send 5 leads to your inbox, in less than five minutes.

Does It Work?

Five can deliver qualified leads, but leads nonetheless – you’ll have to “cold-call” those leads using good, old-fashioned engagement on Twitter – (for now anyway –Bueda hopes to expand to other social networking sites in the near future.)

Five sounds ideal, serving up five leads per day per campaign, for free (10 leads and multiple campaigns are available for $50 a month). But semantics is not an exact science. A mention on Twitter doesn’t necessarily equal a hot lead.

So, while we wait to see what comes of this new tool, let’s agree that Bueda’s Five is a smart way to touch like-minded people. And, maybe, uncover some great leads. Best of all, it costs nothing to find out.

Will you use Bueda’s Five to find prospects? Or is this just another (ho-hum) toy-of-the-moment?

If one of your complaints about social media marketing is the time it consumes, you’ll love this little gem of a tool:

The program is Nutshellmail…a simple and easy social media organization tool that you can set up literally in just a few short minutes. Nutshellmail aggregates social media email so you receive just 1 email per day summarizing:

Linkedin & Facebook personal messages: Birthdays, photos, friend/connection requests, wall posts, news feeds, group/event invites, private messages. Comment/respond right from your inbox!

Twitter Mentions: See mentions, new followers, quitters, and your friends’ latest tweets in your Twitter summary. Tweet, Reply, Retweet, and DM without leaving your inbox.

MySpace Updates: New messages, friend requests, photos, videos, groups, and status updates

Ning Updates: All the latest from your Ning networks, like The Copywriters Business Network!

Imagine! Turn off all your alerts, set up Nutshellmail, and reap the rewards of extra time!

Check it out- I think you’ll love it. I do.

As a busy entrepreneur, you already know that leveraging the benefits of the Internet and social media are a given today, if you hope to be successful.

One of the most effective ways to do so is to stay on top of what is being said about you, your company, and your products and services.

But there is much more to it than simply ‘googling’ your name.

With hundreds of social media sites and more cropping up every day, having the right tools for the job makes it so much easier to get in, get done, and get on to the next thing.

Want to eavesdrop on the conversation about you? Here’s how the experts do it:

Social Mention is a free, real time social media search engine that searches more than one hundred social media sites simultaneously – such as Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – to collect comments and links about you and your company. Perform individual searches whenever you want, or set up alerts to instantly notify you when new information is posted.

Board Tracker is a really cool tool. Board Tracker watches forums, thousands of them, and notifies you whenever your name or company name is mentioned (or any other keywords or phrases you want to watch). Forums are very important for following the conversation about you. Here is where people chat, gossip, share information…if what they are saying about you is positive, you’ll feel pretty good. If it’s not…well let’s just say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

HootSuite is a power Twitter tool for those who want to manage multiple Twitter accounts, share Twittering duties with friends or co-workers, track how many people click the links you tweet out, pre-schedule your messages or feed your blog to Twitter…truly cool.

Wish you could apply the power of Google Analytics to maximize your reach on Twitter? You can! www.TwitterAnalyzer.com is a tool you’ll go back to again and again to review comprehensive statistics regarding your daily tweets, who’s retweeting you, how far your message reaches, how popular you are on Twitter…all indications of a successful marketing campaign.

As always, I’ll bet you have your own favorites. Care to share?

Last week, we talked about finding time in your day to begin marketing yourself online using social media. Many of you commented, and rightly so, “it ain’t easy.”

So I thought I’d point out a few useful, free social media marketing tools to help you be more productive and efficient as you access the power of the Internet.

Free Twitter Tools

Your Twitter account is ready to go. You’re mentally ready to deal with a flood of customers…after all, stats show your Twitter followers are about 80% more likely to buy from you. So the question is: how can you keep up with your tweets and retweets?

How about Twitter.search? Just like a Google search, Twitter.search will let you search for hot topics in real time. Search by keyword, search your name or company name…filter any type of search at all, and ‘spy’ on what’s hot and what’s not.

Want to filter your Twitter searches in real time and geographically? Try Monitter to target a specific geographic radius, using sets of three keywords.

Want to keep your finger on the pulse of what people are saying about your company…or any company or topic? Then you want Trakur, a comprehensive social media monitoring tool that monitors any topic, sends alerts via RSS or email, allows custom filtering of results, tracks sentiments and trends, automates monitoring of your online reputation, gathers insights into customer behavior, tracks the effectiveness of your marketing campaign…

WHEW! Trakur is truly the Mac Daddy of free social monitoring tools.

Remember the Milk is a time management tool that helps you stay organized…not so easy when you’re managing a busy business and playing a daily round of social media marketing.

Remember the Milk helps you manage daily tasks, create reminders, share those reminders with your team and access reminders from your smart phone. You can integrate your schedule with Google Calendar, add tasks from iGoogle, plot your to-do list on a map, organize lists and notes, and then easily search anything you’ve stored to quickly refresh your memory. Awesome.

And lest we forget that what happens after you capture the lead is also important, there’s MailChimp, a nifty web-based mailing list manager that offers tracking and analyzing of email campaigns along with customized HTML templates. If you send less than 3,000 emails each month to 500 or less subscribers, MailChimp is free. But that’s not even the best part!

MailChimp can be upgraded and integrated with Twitter, Wordpress and other sites. Free training is available too. MailChimp allows you to share your email campaign across multiple networking channels via auto tweets and includes retweet analysis to determine effectiveness of your campaign. Even your clients can share your email campaign across their own social networks. How’s that for cool features?

What other social media marketing tools do you use and like?