The Confident Copywriter

Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Social media ‘measurement’ isn’t everything. (There. I said it.) If you’re a big company with a big marketing budget, there are some terrific tools available. However, if you’re a solopreneur and somewhat new to social media, your own good sense is the best place to begin. Why? Because when you’re just starting out, ROI is not the issue. Engagement is the issue. All the tools in the world aren’t going to help you until you learn how to engage.

Let’ say you send out 100 LinkedIn invites and most of those people connect with you. Great! You’re in the game. Your next step is to look for synergies… connections offering products and services complementary to your business. This is crucial: don’t simply connect with hundreds or thousands of people. Connect with collegial (friends, coworkers) or complementary organizations. And really connect! Engage with people; ask questions; share information; seek out ways to work together. Along the way, you’ll connect with many who don’t fit either category, but that’s ok….because those connections can open the door for future referral opportunities. It’s important to be selective, but don’t fall into paranoia… you never know where some connections might lead. My advice here is to lighten up a bit and don’t be overly rigid about the ‘value’ of every single connection.

Once you’ve gone thru this process several times, you’ll get a feel for it. Taking 20 minutes or so out of each day to focus on your social media efforts will actually become fun…the upside being that you’ll want to engage even more.

Here’s where your ‘good sense’ measurement comes into play: your activities are sure to spark responses. Consider briefly tracking those responses in a simple spreadsheet, perhaps for a week or two. Be precise and track everything, or simply track the meaningful responses; particularly, any that sound like warm or hot leads. I did this and I was surprised to see how many meaningful connections I was actually making over the course of a week. In the early stages, this is an excellent and easy form of measurement.

Here’s my point: It’s not about tracking. It’s about connecting your actions to your progress. The only tool you need to get started is right between your ears. If social media marketing works for you (you enjoy the process, you’re meeting great people, getting leads, referrals, etc.) you’re doing it right. Keep doing it! Later on, you can worry about formal measurement tactics.

If you’re feeling confused about social media, wait till we start talking about mobile marketing!

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?

If you’ve been trying to get in on the conversation on Facebook or Twitter, but you’re left feeling like a wallflower at the prom, welcome to the club.

Social media is no fad (as many once thought). It’s here to stay, and must be integrated into any current or future marketing plan…yes, even for copywriters. Especially for copywriters! You don’t have to become an addict; just proficient enough to use and benefit from these revolutionary marketing tools.

Social media is a proactive opportunity to be in the right place at the right time…when someone needs YOU.

Think of it like this: Your neighbor invites you next door for a party. As you walk in the door, you see hundreds of other guests. They are clustered around in groups, heads together, talking quietly about something seemingly important. You murmur hello and scurry to find the host. You ask her, “What’s everyone buzzing about?” She responds, “Everyone in that room is a business owner. They all have the same problem…finding a qualified, professional writer. That’s why I invited you!”

I want to go to that party!

Social media networking offers the unprecedented opportunity for one lone person to begin personal and professional friendships…which lead to provocative threads of conversation….which lead to creating resources and individual networks…which lead to in-depth exchanges…that eventually lead to building off- and online communities…which can achieve big goals: increased profits, an impact on the greater good, worldwide attention for your favorite cause, etc…the likes of which has never before been available without a huge advertising budget.

When combined with other hot tools, like podcasts, videos, ‘meetups’, or a newsletter, the results can be even more astounding.

The value of social media is not profits. I can hear you analytical types right now, wondering how ROI can be measured from these efforts. The value of social media is “goodwill”…and the camaraderie that, since the dawn of man, has formed the real foundation for success. The profits come later.

Social media is the golf course of the 21st century. And you never get rained out.