Part 1 and Part 2 covered a range of topics about how to activate your social media profiles, connect them, automate posting across platforms, ping directory and search sites, optimise for search engines and perform analytics to understand your readership. In Part 3, we will cover your Facebook fan pages and your Twitter and YouTube accounts.
#1. Branding with Twitter and Faceboook
By properly managing your Twitter and Facebook profiles you maximise the opportunity for cross referencing and drive home your brand name at all available touchpoints. My blogs have different names – I run four at the moment – but I am the main author so I use my personal Twitter and Facebook profiles on each blog. But I also have invitation only Facebook groups for each blog name as there more authors than me who contribute to the sites. For example, my main blog is Social Media & Marketing PR Strategy and I have an invitation only Facebook group under this name as well as the links to my personal Twitter and Facebook profiles – all on each page of the blog.
I also maintain a master Facebook page called Crazy Man’s Utopia and offer a follow link to this on all blog pages – this makes sense if you are running multiple blog sites. The key message here – if your blog is called Ditto That then set up a Twitter account and Facebook page called Ditto That and promote links to these pages from your blog. If you have multiple blogs also create a master Facebook page and offer a follow option on your blog pages for this too. Also promote your other blogs in your Blogroll section on each blog.
#2. Get likes on your Facebook Fan Pages
I have used many tools for this but the hands down winner on all fronts is Twiends in my opinion. Visit the site, register and start getting followers straight away. While alot of these followers will never actually visit your page to activate the LIKE option (this is done through the Twiends interface) – the chances are that if your posts are interesting then you can attract their attention at a later date and retain their LIKE.
The key use for these follow sites is to get a start. If your Facebook link shows you have 10 fans – are others going to follow you? Probably not. If it shows 300 – then your chances are greater. The Twiends “currency” is SEEDS – get seeds by following others or purchasing from the site.
If you are struggling to get the most out of Facebook with the new format then check out this article for some tips on how to manage.
#3. Get Twitter & YouTube followers
Get a tool to manage all those tweets that you will be sending and receiving – check out this article to see four useful Twitter automation tools and how to use them. The same rule for followers applies to Twitter and YouTube as to Facebook – the more followers the better. It shows potential followers that lots of others value your content and increases the likelihood of getting organic follows from your blog pages.
Twiends also offers this service but also check out TweetBig. TweetBig offer a scheduled services that avoids you getting into bother with the powers that be for aggressive following. Twiends also offers a scheduler to help avoid this problem. If you ignore the rules your accounts will be suspended by Twitter and Facebook. See #4 below for more information on these rules. Drip feeding and spreading out your follows is the way around this and both sites allow you to do this.
Take a look at this great article for 5 New Twitter Tools worth exploring. To get an idea of how many followers others on Twitter have see this interesting graphic:
#4. Understand the Twitter and Facebook site rules
(From Tweet Spinner) “There’s no use blindly follow everyone who tweets certain words. The result isn’t pretty. Sure, you will have a couple of decent new friends, but by and large you are going to end up with a huge number of spammers and other pesky new “friends”. That’s just not good. (And it’s also against Twitter’s rules, and you risk losing your account!)”.
Make sure you check out and familiarise yourself with the rules on aggressive following or liking – otherwise you could find months of work wasted when your account is revoked.
In the next post of this series I will expand on marketing techniques that extend your reach even further. If you want to be notified when I post this then please subscribe to my blog using the options in the sidebar.
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