I have been reaching out to some friends today, and it reminds me just how simple, yet valuable, saying “hi” can be. Some days, the networker in me takes over and I make time for just saying “hi” to people.
I often look through my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn connections and seek out their telephone number to call and say hello. It often surprises people that I called them, because in many cases they were just “online acquaintances” prior to my call. When they hear a friendly “hi”, it can break the ice and open the door for a more meaningful and memorable connection.
Sure, you could say that you just don’t have time for it. After all, when you break the barrier between the broadcast effect of social networking and enter a more personal networking space, it takes more time. You may only reach one at a time with “hi”, but isn’t it worth a try?
How important can this be? I am not offering return on investment figures for this, but I can certainly say that it has been beneficial to me in many ways. Sometimes I find that people are really pleased that I took the time to connect by voice, and other times they wonder how I got their number (Tip: A WHOIS search can be very handy). I have often been met with kind questions about how my wife and kids are doing, or about something I recently wrote. However, I have never been met with insult.
Stop Overlooking the Value of “Hi”
“Hi” is a basic essential of networking, and yet it is so easy to neglect when we get busy or rely too heavily on a broadcast mentality. Networking with others and being friendly with a simple “hi” can have some very unexpected benefits. If you don’t believe me, just try it.
I love helping people to find what they are seeking. Whether they are looking for friends, customers, a job, or pink ponies, I try my best to know the right people to refer them to. That is the networker in me, and I have always enjoyed being able to connect people. Of course, that means knowing them, first.
It can be extremely refreshing to reach out to others and learn more about them. It is a great way to learn what motivates them, and that can be very motivating. With an attitude of seeking what they want, and how you can help them find it, you may be surprised how receptive people can be. When it is done without self-seeking, it can create some unexpected results. It can also create some great friendships and business alliances … you never know.
There surely must be some tension between the social media giants, Twitter and Facebook. After all, social media is a fiercely competitive and also very profitable industry. Once in a while, there is a blaring case of irony to make us laugh.
Irony:“… situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions.” (source: Wikipedia)
Maybe you will not find this as amusing as I do. After all, I laugh at a lot of absurdities that I discover online. Social media is fantastic for a laugh, and I may never get the pictures of people with back-boobs and front-butts out of my head. Yes, that’s right, I said back boobs and front butts. See for yourself at your local Wal Mart store, or follow the humorous links I provided.
NOTE: I know some fine people with back boobs and front butts, but let’s face it Snuggies are cheap, and they could disguise that stuff better than Spandex!
Now back to this social media irony of Facebook and Twitter. We have all heard that we should be using Twitter, right? Anybody in the marketing industry will, at a minimum, recommend reserving your brand name at Twitter.com.
Twitter grew like influenza since 2007, and millions of people flocked to the service to find out what a “tweet” is all about. I must say that it was not without merit, and I have participated quite heartily in the conversation surrounding Twitter.
Long before Twitter … centuries before Twitter (in Internet time, of course) we had Facebook. Facebook really hit the world by storm, and grew to over 500 million users in short order. Do you realize how big 500,000,000 is? It is big … very big!
Obviously, Facebook has a stronghold in the social media industry, but we still cannot overlook Twitter for its complex simplicity. I like Twitter enough that I wrote a book about the service, so this is certainly not a bash on Twitter. It is just an observation.
I also like Facebook, and I can spend hours spying on the lives of nearly everybody I ever knew. Then, of course, there are those many companies who do not even see it coming while I am compiling the information I need in order to crush their business with marketing intelligence that I pick up on Facebook.
A logical and meaningful bash against Facebook is like slapping a hungry grizzly bear with a slab of meat and then hoping I can outrun it. It is one of those things that sounds stupid even when smart people say it. Facebook is a winner in the information age. Knock Facebook if you like, but 500 million kind of speaks for itself.
No, this is not a bashing, but I question how they see each other. What is a good way to open a dialog of speculation on how the two social media giants view the others’ service? Make up your own mind on this (and please share your comments), but to me it seems that a look at each of their usage of the others’ service should say something. What it says could be taken different ways, and I will let you chime in with your thoughts.
Twitter on Facebook
Twitter has a Facebook account with hundreds of thousands of fans. My logical assumption would be that Twitter may actually have something more than 140 characters (the character limit on Twitter) to say to all of those adoring fans. Sure, they have a blog, and of course they have Twitter, but it seems that Facebook is not just “the competition”, and it could serve some great uses for Twitter. It seems that Twitter did not ask for, nor act upon my opinion … or the opinion of the 714,256 people who elected to “Like” them on Facebook. As the image below illustrates, “Twitter has no recent posts.” Surely they have something available if you click on “older posts”, right? No … nothing at all. They signed up for an account and did not use it, just the same way as the overwhelming majority of accounts created on Twitter. Irony? Just wait, because there’s more!
Twitter on Facebook
Facebook on Twitter
I guess I never really pay much attention to Facebook on Twitter, but they are there, and using the service. When I want to know more about Facebook, I either look at Facebook or find it on one of my favorite Facebook-focused blogs. Facebook really does not need Twitter, but they apparently found value in embracing Twitter as another tool. I commend them on the choice to use Twitter, and it just makes good sense to me.
In contrast to Twitter’s blank Facebook page, Facebook sends updates using Twitter. As illustrated in the image below, Facebook is not a huge user of Twitter, but has sent 683 tweets since their account was created in March 2007.
Facebook on Twitter
Does Twitter Really Hate Facebook?
I guess it is a stretch to say that Twitter hates Facebook, but it is pretty clear that they do not have anything to say to the people who chose to “Like” their Facebook page. It seems that they could at least try it out and perhaps come out and say “tweet”.
SEO and Social Media Chicken Poop
I have heard many arguments separating SEO and social media by trying to decypher which is more valuable. Many of the people arguing this point are on one side or the other, and miss the point that they are both tactics which work together toward an overall strategy. Many people also seem to miss the fact that they are largely the same thing.
Here are a few questions that marketers use for producing arguments:
Which is more important … SEO or social media?
Which discipline provides the higher return on investment?
OK, that last one was my own personal interpretation, but seriously … how can people get this so mixed up that they stand in their corner arguing their respective knowledge without coming together in the center and having a big group hug?
SEO opens a lot of doors for companies. Having their greatness spread across the Internet in a way that people will find it when they search for something is extremely productive. People still ask me the question “how will people find my website?” To me, the question seems pretty easy … they will search for it! Having great information on a well prepared website and making it available to search engines is a “no-brainer”. Well, it is a “some-brainer”, because a lot of people still don’t really grasp it. In any case, it is very valuable, and backed up with a lot of facts. It also provides a lot of value to back up your social media marketing endeavors.
Social media is a great way to discover the people who may be interested in searching for you. It is often a proactive approach where you can add yourself to the mix. It is also a great way to learn more about those people who are already searching for you, will be searching for you, or may never search for you but will take a recommendation from others they trust. It also provides a lot of value to your search engine optimization endeavors.
I find that a lot of people get these two fields very confused, both by trying to separate them and by trying to merge them. SEO and social media both have their own unique qualities, but the reality is that trying to separate them is about as easy as picking chicken poop out of your toothpaste.
Both of these areas of Internet marketing are the same in many ways. Search engines use popularity of a website measured by incoming links pointing to the website content as a major factor for ranking. Social media also uses the popularity of website content as a major factor for ranking. What a lot of people fail to realize is how much they both work the same, and they both work in synergy.
I would be pleased to carry on in my typically lengthy way of writing until my brain hurts from extolling the values of these various marketing tools, but I have already done that. After all, have you seen my blog title? It is titled “SEO and Social Media Marketing Blog“ for a reason.
Today, I want you to jump in and help me to explain how both are intertwined yet diverse.
If you can offer a better way to describe the relationship of SEO and social media than to say that it is like trying to pick chicken poop from your toothpaste, I will offer you a kiss full on the mouth. I have nice fresh breath, but I can assure you that I have found a whole lot of “chicken poop in my toothpaste”.
Are Twitter’s networking and conversation possibilities still compelling, or is Twitter mostly for link sharing and SEO now? The experience of Twitter is different for each individual, but maybe there is also a collective answer.
If you have used Twitter as long as I have, you have surely seen a lot of change. I opened my first Twitter account in April 2008, just over two and a half years ago. I used Twitter to announce my racing starts and results, and to let people know when my auto racing webcast was live. I was too busy on race tracks to use it for much else.
In the beginning, I was pretty unaware of the great value of Twitter, as most of us were, but then I decided to take a little closer look when I created my @murnahan account. Twitter’s usefulness really struck me after I learned about a fire that happened on the roof of my kids’ school, about 100 yards from my home, in a Twitter update. No, I didn’t learn about that fire by hearing the fire trucks or standing in my driveway and seeing flashing lights. I discovered it on Twitter. This was when I decided that Twitter was really worth a closer look.
Witnessing the Twitter Boom
There was a time, about a year and a half ago, when you were “nobody” if you didn’t use Twitter. It was a sudden craze that dragged celebrities in by the hundreds, and all that publicity coaxed people to check it out. Many of the huge boom of Twitter users were pretty skeptical of Twitter, but they just had to know what it was all about. It was a really amazing tool back then, for those who learned how to use it to meet people and build a network.
The Twitter boom was in full swing, but the majority of new users did not return more than a few times, and Twitter experienced massive losses of users. The number of new users was still skyrocketing, but the number of people actually using the service looked bleak. The loss rate was high.
Twitter is still pretty close to the same service, overall, and the tools surrounding Twitter were made better since that time. What has changed is in how it has been used, which is unique for each of us, but has a collective affect on Twitter as well. Like any tool, it can be used in productive ways, or in unproductive ways. A hammer can build a home, or it can destroy one. Unfortunately, many users have been influenced by the “dark side” and have been less than productive for themselves and the community as a whole.
There are many people who will choose to use Twitter to “build a house” rather than destroy one, but there are enough hammers swinging that it can be pretty challenging to recognize the difference. The confusion and frustration showed many Twitter users the door, and they left.
Twitter made it really easy to meet people, but this had a downside, too. I have met a lot of great people using Twitter. I have also met thousands of people who have no more use for me than to add another number to their Twitter follower count in hopes that I will click their link and buy something from them.
Are the Good Days of Twitter Gone?
Twitter became the easiest network of all for gaining a following of people. I called it the Twitter Follower Frenzy in an article from June 2009, and it just kept growing from there. I found that for a lot of users, it felt like an obligation to refollow anybody who loved them enough to follow their Twitter feed. Heck, I never sought followers, but somehow I ended up following over 20,000 people, mostly just because they had followed me and I wanted to seem politely accessible.
The Follower Frenzy led to a huge pitfall. Call me an ass for pointing this out, but it is really true, and I can tell you why. Twitter gained a lot of it’s popularity among marketers because it was fun, interactive, informative, and because it was a really easy way to bring thousands of people to a website. Once people seemed to “figure out” that anybody and everybody can be a “marketing expert”, Twitter was the low hanging fruit. Twitter would become the place where anybody could be a success by pushing out advertisements, or so they hoped.
How extreme was the lure of Twitter? Back in early 2009, when I would send a Twitter update I could watch anywhere from 500-2,000 visits to my blog from a single “tweet”. Less than 300 unique visitors attributable to a given tweet meant that Twitter was down.
It was apparent that anything worth a tweet was going to be quite visible. Twitter was really useful for bringing attention to websites, thus it became highly abused. It can still be useful for sharing information, but nothing like early 2009. It was really very astonishing.
I had a lot of fun with Twitter back then. Here is a video I produced reflecting the fun I had: Twitter Kids
Is Twitter Really Damaged, or is it Just Me?
It was easy for me, at first, to question whether I had just become less useful or interesting. I ruled this out, because all of my other networks and my blog were still doing fine. Perhaps I have become less interactive with Twitter, but that was actually more of a reaction than the cause. I slowed my use of Twitter as a conversation and networking tool when it started looking more like just another link sharing network.
I questioned whether it was just me who noticed a lot less interaction on Twitter, but I can definitively answer that this was not the case. There was a collective damage by many users, and there was actually a defining moment when Twitter started going down hill for me, and for a lot of others. Ironically, it was right about the time I launched the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends” which so many of my Twitter friends urged me to write.
I still find usefulness to Twitter for it’s search functions and for communicating with a few friends. I like Twitter, I really do, but where I have noted troubles with Twitter is in the number of people who took their follower count too seriously and it became a shouting contest where millions of people tried to get their 15 minutes of fame or to sell their goods and services. It started to look like a huge business opportunity to millions of people.
Collective Benefit of Reviving Twitter
The question of whether Twitter is worth “reviving” is a matter that is up to each of us to answer. We each use Twitter in our own ways, and we each see different results. A revival of Twitter is something that we each do on an individual basis, and it largely affects only our own experience with the service.
At the same time, I still hold some belief that if enough people took the initiative, there would also be a collective benefit. It took a collective effort to cause the damage and subsequent loss of interest in many people. Similarly, doesn’t it seem possible that there could be a collective repair and restoration of people’s interest if we reversed some of the damage?
I think there can still be a lot of great conversations and relationships built, but it will take effort. It will likely require close attention to follower/following connections, and making lists to manage all the information.
The days of massive website traffic and huge allure to inexperienced and shotgun-blast marketers has dwindled. The allure to spammers is still there, but it seems less pervasive because they realized it is no longer the goldmine they hoped for. The useless garbage is easier than ever to filter out if you make the effort.
Perhaps now if people will concern themselves less with unrealistic popularity and inflated numbers, and more with purposeful popularity within a core group of interesting people, Twitter can still be a great networking tool. That is, if we can bring back some of the interest of those great people who just became bored, irritated, and deaf from the static.
Well, what are your thoughts? Don’t be shy!
P.S.
I hand-picked a small group of articles I have written about Twitter over time. I hope you will enjoy these:
I find that for a lot of people, Facebook marketing consists of creating a Facebook page (or worse, a Facebook profile) and gathering a few “fans” who will give them just enough inspiration to feel they are being productive. They will put the Facebook “f” on their website in order to appear more modern, and keep their fingers crossed hoping that somehow Facebook will increase their profits.
There is a lot of confusion about Facebook, and especially for small businesses. However, small business is not alone, and unleashing the real value of marketing using Facebook is elusive for many companies. Efforts are often just enough to keep the person signing the checks on board for another 30 days for more trial and error. Poor planning and lack of measurement are commonplace in social media marketing, but that is not an effective way to run a marketing campaign.
Facebook marketing is often looked at with an eye toward “trying it out” and keeping the risk low. It is challenging for many people to accept, but the risk should go down the more you put into it.
Facebook can be a great place to market your business. If performed well, it can also help you to gather a lot of really useful data to help your business outside of the Facebook platform. Let’s unwrap a true sense of how a Facebook marketing campaign could look. This is the dramatically abbreviated version, of course. I will break this down into steps as follows:
Skip around as you like. Some of this is for the novice, while some of it is less novice. In any case, I hope that you will find it to be useful information.
There is a lot that you can do with a Facebook page. Of course, note that I said “page” and not “profile”. There is a huge difference between a Facebook page and a Facebook profile. More companies are figuring this out every day as their profiles are being deleted for breaking Facebook’s policy regarding using profiles for business.
Name your page well, fill out every field in the Facebook page setup, and seed it with enough information that your earliest fans will know why they should “Like” it other than just because you said they should.
Tip: While creating your Facebook page, roll these few words around in your head: inviting, interesting, creative, unique, different, informational, entertaining, humorous … or whatever will be attractive to the audience you seek.
Optional: If you have a good FBML (Facebook Markup Language) programmer and a designer worth a hoot, it will help. This is not critical, but can be very useful.
The step of customer modeling is skipped so often that there should be little wonder why most Facebook marketing fails miserably. Lack of proper customer modeling is a cause for many marketing endeavors to fail, but this is especially true in the current world where “everybody is a marketer” as witnessed in abundance on Facebook. A large segment of Facebook marketing is not performed by a marketing professional, but rather a business owner or somebody with limited marketing experience.
One of the tragic pieces of information missing for the average person trying their hand at Facebook marketing is that marketing does not just mean shotgun blast advertising. To get the most out of marketing, we need to know answers to questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. We need to reach the right people or we waste credibility.
I don’t care how great your hamster skin purses are, I am not in the market. Marketing those purses to me is a huge waste of time.
Customer modeling involves creativity, analytic thinking, and data. If you do not have the data to tell you who, what, where, when, how, and why people will respond to your marketing, you need to create it. Without knowing how to reach the right people with the right information, you may as well skip all the rest, because your time and money will largely be wasted. Worse yet, it can damage your brand value.
Think of how much you enjoy receiving badly targeted advertising for things you would never purchase and then consider how much people will enjoy it coming from you.
Fortunately, there are reliable ways to get your hands on this data you so badly need. If you are certain that you already have a good handle on customer modeling, move on to the next step. If not, don’t worry, I will get back to this, so move to the next step anyway.
An easy first approach to promoting a Facebook page is to suggest it to all of your Facebook friends. Sure, that makes sense, and if they actually like you, there is a better chance they will “Like” your page. This is fine, and I recommend it, but often not a really good target demographic for your business. Besides, don’t all of your friends already know what you do for a living?
A common hope is that you will have something so brilliant and earth-shaking that some of those friends will buy from you, and when their friends see that they “Like” your Facebook page, that it will spread massively and the whole population of Facebook will come swarming and buy everything you offer for sale. Yes, that sounds awesome, right? Rub a lamp! It does not work this way, and if you tried it, you probably already know this is the case.
Your Facebook friends, although surely a great group of people, are often not as passionate about what you sell as you are.
An effective alternative is to use carefully targeted Facebook advertising to reach a specific audience. I am going to provide an example of how to reach specific people, and also how to use the information you gain from it.
Mark’s Example: Let’s say I am trying to sell Smart Slate interactive whiteboards. No, I do not sell these, and I have no stake in the market. I chose this, because I wrote about it as another example a while back. This is just an example to explain targeting using Facebook advertising to build a better marketing strategy.
What do I know about the Smart Slate market off the top of my head? I know that they are used in a lot of classrooms. I also know that schools have a hard time budgeting for them. I actually know this because my kids’ school has had fundraisers to buy them. So, in this case, I may want to test my Facebook ads with teachers and other school related interests. Why do I want to connect with teachers? I will explain that more in Step Four.
Since I am only going to sell these items in a specific region, I only want to target specific areas. I could choose to target anything from a worldwide audience to only my specific city. For the example, I will use my state of Kansas, and the surrounding states of Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma. Now, in order to target teachers in my target area, I will go to create an ad on Facebook and see what kind of a target I can come up with. It will look something like this screenshot:
Notice that this brings the selected audience down in size but it is still far from being targeted. It still leaves me with 8,578,280 people age 18 and older who live in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma or Colorado. That is far too broad, and it could look like selling hamster skin purses at a college fraternity party. I am not out to waste time and money. I want more customers.
Next, I will set some demographic details. In this example, I will target young teachers who may be more interested in technology, so I am using 30-40 year old college graduates who have specified interests in their Facebook profiles as follows: teaching; teacher; elementary teacher; teaching resources; or teachers. Note that Facebook helped me by suggesting interests. Here is what it looks like:
Now I have an estimated reach of 44,480 people who live in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma or Colorado between the ages of 30 and 40 who graduated from college and like teaching, teacher, elementary teacher, teaching resources or teachers. This is looking better, but there is still a lot of potential for fine-tuning. This simply gives me a starting point for one of several ads I may want to use for testing my audience. In other test ads, I may want to broaden or narrow the age range and condense or expand my target based on demographics.
Once I have run the ads for a couple weeks, I will want to give careful attention to who responded. Facebook will report this information to me, and tell me what other common interests my responding test audience have. Who knows, I may find that a lot of my respondents also love hamster skin purses. If so, you can bet I am going to use that information in my other marketing efforts, as well as how I address my new pals on my Facebook page. I will use this information in my blogging and search engine optimization, as well as other online and offline efforts.
Do you remember that customer modeling that I mentioned? Information like this is what helps you to understand your model customer and stop wasting time and marketing dollars.
Facebook advertising is not where you will make a squillion sales and is not the entire campaign. It is just one tactic within the overall strategy of the campaign (see “Social Media Tactics Without Social Media Strategy Fails“).
Facebook ads are often best used for building brand awareness and bringing in those Facebook fans who will “Like” your page so that you can communicate with them. I said communicate … not just promote your latest special or badger them with flavorless advertisements. Provide them with value in whatever way you can. This is another step, and I will get to it, but mark my words: “Provide them with value!”
Something really great about Facebook advertising is the potential for segmentation. You can target an audience based on very specific interests that they have expressed with their “Likes and Interests”. This is not guesswork, and the segmentation possibilities are quite useful.
This is tricky for a lot of people. What are the keys to making awesomeness? A lot of it comes with experience. Awesomeness requires continual effort, so it should not be seen as just a quick fix. Marketing talent is not just inherited. It takes practice and patience.
In the case of my example in Step Three of reaching teachers with a message about Smart Slates, I want to learn from them. I want them to teach me their challenges, and learn how I can help them to afford my products. I want to learn what they have found useful about the products. I want to hear their success stories of school fundraisers which worked well. I want to help other teachers to find better ways to get my products into their classrooms. If I do this well, and if I am really useful to them, I will have a lot better chance of selling more Smart Slates in their school district. Plus, I will connect with a good number of teachers who may be more willing to relay my brand name to others.
Now, doesn’t this start to look more like a strategy than just advertising? This is what I mean by creating awesomeness. Doing things different from the rest and making a useful impact in some way.
Listen to the people on your Facebook page, and give them reasons to talk to you. Give them what they want. If you have done your customer modeling well, you have the information you need about what they will respond to. Use this information well, and use it for their benefit and not just your own.
If you have restaurant, ask them what their favorite menu item is, and how you could make it even better. Ask them reasons they like you and how you can improve. Have fun with them and post a challenge to see if anybody can eat the whole thing.
If you sell engine blocks, start a Facebook discussion and ask them if they have any engine replacement tips to share with others. Find out if they love auto racing, and what kind. Get them to post photos of the cars they are putting those engine blocks in. Learn if there are other performance auto parts they need.
If you sell Smart Slates, provide helpful tips for teachers or information for running a successful school fundraiser. Learn from the teachers.
If you sell cars … well, don’t get me started about car dealers using Facebook. That is another blog article, and I already wrote it.
I think you get my point. Just don’t act like a stereotypical car salesman!
You can do this all alone, or you may choose to enlist the assistance of an experienced marketer. In either case, it is best to pay attention and keep your eyes wide open to the possibilities. Marketing is a whole lot more than just shouting into a crowd and hoping for results. Applying good principles of marketing to the right people and with a better message can provide measurable benefits to a company.
This is a lot more targeted, measurable, and useful than other marketing tools such as the once-popular television advertising. I mean, just look at what television is doing these days.
