One thing about me is I absolutely LOVE answering questions. I’d play Trivial Pursuit every day if only I could get my hubby (a Monopoly devotee) and my little one (a Candy Land fan) on board. Usually, when answering questions I write long detailed e-mails. But it occurred to me that I already adressed many of the above questions on my blog:

Let’s start with “what’s social media” – it’s basically a catch-phrase that refers to all the conversations between individuals, businesses and organizations, that happen online. These conversations can be in various formats – written words, videos, audio, photos, you name it. The key is not so much the form (full-length blog post, video, etc) or even specific channel used (Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc), but the fact that it’s a CONVERSATION (as opposed to a monologue). So if there’s a way for more than 1 party to join in and discuss things – through posts, comments, status updates, reviews, etc – then it belongs to social media.
 
As applied to specific channels:
 
Blogs – allow for conversations to happen through comments – that’s a social media channel
Facebook – is basically built on conversations – that’s also a social media channel
Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc… – conversations between users are either foundation of these sites (Twitter) or at least possible through commenting, linking, sharing, etc – that’s all social media channels
 
Newsletters (sent via e-mail) – if someone decides to respond to a newsletter article, there’s no easy way for them to do it other than e-mailing the newsletter author. Newsletters do not allow for open conversation easily visible to all parties; instead they are primarily means of one-way communication. So newsletters are NOT social media.
 
If you are considering whether to add social media to your marketing strategy, be aware of the barriers to avoid wasting valuable time and getting disappointed with the results.  

Of course, with tens of thousands blogs and hundreds of social networking/bookmarking sites, it’s important to narrow the list down quite a bit and figure out which social networks would be the best for you to be on. 
 
But there’s more to social media strategy than selecting the best channels. This post on building a social media strategy can help you get started. 

If you are considering blogging, then be aware of the time it’ll take to write and maintain a blog. It also helps to put together an editorial calendar at least for the first couple of months just until you get into the groove of things. I also wrote a post that helps decide whether to have a newsletter, a blog or both.
 
And don’t forget, you can leave questions for me in the post comments as well as by e-mailing me directly at yelena@oneclickva.com. Keep ‘em coming

How is Social Media Used for Business? is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

Related posts:

1. 9 More Ways Virtual Assistant Can Help Market Your Business
2. How to Build Your Social Media Strategy
3. Best for Last – June 12, 2009

Now, let me take a wild guess here.  It’ll be LinkedIn, Twitter and either a Facebook profile or even a fanpage. You might have YouTube on your (or your VA’s) list as well and a couple other ones. Once everything is set up, you or your VA (or the two of you) start spending time “networking” and “marketing”, and “building relationships” and “creating a loyal community” and doing all sorts of other interesting and time-consuming things. It’s fun really, this social networking thing, except you realize at some point that you’re just not getting anything tangible (aka money, customers, buzz, subscribers, etc) out of it.

Well, it might be a problem with how you define and track your social networking goals. Or it might be something else entirely. Namely, that you’re spending all that time and money essentially “barking up the wrong tree”. Yep, your or your assistant’s arbitrary choice of social networks might be to blame for lack of the results.

Here’s an actual advice from a virtual assistant on the subject of which social networks a client needs to be on (mind you, this VA hasn’t even asked if the client is in B2B or B2C type of business; whether he sells products or services; and what specific goal is he trying to achieve anyway):

I would start a client with Facebook and LinkedIn, see how those go and then maybe add Twitter and/or Digg.

My immediate question is this – how long do you think it’d take this VA to “see how those go” and at what cost to the client?

My point is this – when you or your virtual assistant put together a to-do list for social networking, ask a simple WHY question, such as “why do you think this is the right network for my business?” And please, do some listening first.

Don’t be afraid to sign up for 5, 10 or even 20 social networks. After all, it takes only a couple of minutes to create basic accounts on each (your business name, brief description, site URL, you know the drill). Then start listening. Set up searches for your keywords, subscribe to RSS feeds, follow others, join groups just to listen, lurk to your heart’s content. Keep track of what you see and hear – are there any mentions of your brand, your product/service, your comeptitors, the needs your business fills? Who says what and how often it’s being said, that type of thing.

After a while you’ll get a pretty good idea of your top 3 networks. These aren’t just the popular ones, but the ones that are popular with your target audience AND that are relevant to your brand, your product. They are also the sites with features that you can use in your marketing (i.e. if the only video you plan n having is a 2-min company promo, then why bother with YouTube). These social networks will be at the core of your social networking strategy. Now you can start tactical implementation – creating extended profiles, building a fan page, starting a group, connecting, talking, status updating, etc.

Of course, listening takes time. But you know what they say about people who rush in, right? Besides, lurking is cheap, much cheaper than, say, building fan pages.

Social Networks – Are You in the Right Ones? is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

Related posts:

1. Connecting to Competitors on Social Networks
2. Disappointed with Social Networking?
3. How is Social Media Used for Business?

But what if you really REALLY need to have a lot of followers for some big announcement or product launch that’s going to take place … oh, how about 1 week from today?

Here’s a plan – search for your keywords and hashtags in Twitter Search, Twitterfall, Twellow, WeFollow and such and follow everyone who comes up in the search. 20-30% will follow you back and by doing some simple math you can figure out how many you have to follow each day to reach the goal of 5000 Followers in one week.

The reality is it just won’t work. Not by itself anyway. Here’s why:

Aggressive Following

If you start following hundreds of users each day, Twitter might suspend your account for aggresive following. So even though you can follow as many as 2000 people before you hit your first limit (see below), it’s not a good idea to follow them all in one day.

Solution – The only work-around I can suggest for this one is to slow down a bit with following new people, which by the way will give you time to spend some time on communicating via your tweets.  By slowing down you’ll be able to zero in on exactly the people you are trying to reach, building targeted Following. Besides, you’ll have a bit more time to check out their profiles for the latest tweets (so you don’t follow someone who last tweeted 3 months ago), their Following-to-Followers ratio (which is a good indicator of the likelihood of them following you back) and their Network to Updates ratio (a good indicator of how likely they are to actually have a conversation with you, which implies active listening).

Speaking of tweets… Please, do not get on a mass following rampage if you’ve only EVER posted a couple of those or if they are all RTs or Twitterfeed udpates or quotes from famous people, you get the picture. You might as well replace your profile photo (you do have one, right?) with the big red “SPAMMER”.  

Twitter Limits

You’ll have to deal with not one, but two kinds of Twitter limits. Both are established by Twitter to combat spammers and bots. Both are systemic, meaning that there’s really no way you can get around them (not without contacting Twitter first and pleading your case).

First limit ensures that unless an account has 2000 or more followers, it won’t be able to follow more than 2000 other profiles. It’s a simple and straightforward limit.

The second limit comes into play for accounts with more than 2000 followers. Its purpose is to prevent one from having an unbalanced account where number of people you Follow greatly exceeds the number of your Followers. The tricky part about it is that, according to Twitter Support, “this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following.”

Solution – while there’s nothing radical you can do about the limits, you can work around them to some extent. For example, once you reach one of the limits, continue searching for relevant profiles. But instead of following them (which you won’t be able to do), add them to your Twitter Lists. Chances are, they’ll follow you back. 

Unfollowing and Re-following Problems

So let’s say you hit the limit and decide to unfollow a bunch of people and follow some others. Watch out for unfollowing too many people too often. Twitter calls this behavior an “aggressive follow churn” and penalizes with suspensions.

But even if you unfollow on a smaller scale and only ever so often, there’s another problem with this tactics. Just like you can count on some people auto-following you, some will auto-unfollow you.

Solution

Try reaching out to those who haven’t followed you back yet. Read through their feeds, check out their websites and blogs. Then RT or @mention them in your feed, asking a question or promoting their content. It’s no magic bullet. It’s time-consuming and not everyone will follow you back (from my experience, only 10-15% of those mentioned will start following you after the first attempt).

If you have to unfollow, unfollow strategically. Start with the profiles that haven’t been active for a couple of weeks AND who don’t follow you (I use Refollow for this). But even before you do that, go through your Following list and unfollow those irrelevant to your niche or your goals. If these are people you enjoy following, follow them from a different Twitter account.

With all these limits and CAN’Ts, here’s something you CAN do:

• Tweet more often – ok, this goes both ways, actually since some might not follow you (or decide to unfollow you) if you tweet too often. So work out a balance where you tweet more than before, but not every hour on the hour (or more often than that).
• Layoff automation – humanize your profile (start with replacing your logo with your picture), get rid of auto-DMs and please-please suspend or severely limit your Twitterfeed usage.
• Promote others, heavily – retweet (manually, when possible, so that you can make it more personal), mention others, reply to questions and announcements, tweet about their blog posts, etc.
• Use hashtags – build a list of hashtags in your niche and include them in your tweets, just as long as you don’t turn each word of your update into a hashtag.
• Use Lists – add your followers and those who don’t yet follow you to your public lists. Also, keep track of which lists you are on and thank list authors for adding you to their lists.
• Think outside of Twitter – here’s a really good (and short) explanation of how to get a lot of Followers fast.

Getting 5000 Twitter followers in one week is not impossible. But given Twitter limits and increased weariness by folks of Twitter spammers, Internet marketers of the worst kind and various fly-by-nighters, it is unlikely unless you are ready to work hard and think creatively.

How to Get 5000 Twitter Followers by Next Monday is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

Related posts:

1. Whom to Follow on Twitter
2. Twitter – What Can I Say (that would help my business)?
3. 5 Time-Saving Twitter Tools For Busy Business Owners

But wait, aren’t you supposed to be 100% authentic and automation is the opposite of that? Wouldn’t automating some of the social media work go against the spirit of social networking?

I don’t think so and here’s why:

Your time is finite and you can only spend so much of it on various aspects of your business, including social media. If you have enough time to do it all manually without sacrificing other important commitments, then you don’t need to read any further.

Automation tools are just that – tools. In itself they are neither authentic nor unauthentic. It’s up to you how you use them. For example, you can start sending batches of hourly updates with links to dozens of blogs that you don’t even read. Or you can choose to send just a couple of posts each week that impressed you the most.

Automation is only a small part of it – a social media strategy that relies solely on automation and delegation (to an employee or a virtual assistant) won’t get you far. As John Jantsch says in one of the DuctTapeMarketing.com posts “Automation is not a substitute, more of a supplement.”

This being said, I firmly believe that auto-follows, auto-responses, auto-DMs and such do more harm than good when trying to build relationships and trust in social media. That’s why I do not include tutorials on how to automate what’s supposed to be a two-way conversation.

So how do you know what can be automated?

Revisit Your Goals - what are your social media goals and how they will be affected by automation. For example, automation is more suitable if you’re trying to increase your company’s or brand’s visibility online. On the other hand, if you are building yourself up as a niche authority, you should be very careful about what you automate.

Listen carefully – listening in on social media conversations works better if you use at least some automation. Instead of spending hours sifting through conversations and searching for your brand or keyword mentions, set up your filters (Google Alerts, TweetBeep, RSS feeds, Techrigy, etc) once and enjoy consistent results.  

Do Unto Others.. - each time you automate part of your social media involvement, you essentially turn it into a broadcast, a one-way announcement. Automatically posting your blog updates is one thing (since it’s essentially an announcement anyway). Greeting your new followers with a cookie-cutter DM note is a very different situation. In other words, how do you feel when someone else does it to you?

Ok then, let’s see which social media tasks shouldn’t be automated (or for that matter, delegated).

• Following and unfollowing
• Direct messaging
• Replies to other’s direct messages
• Any part of two-way conversations
• Blind and automated content digging or sharing

Feel free to add to this list or disagree with it. Share your experience automating or delegating social media tasks – what you do, are you reaching your goals, tools you use, etc.

Technorati Tags: social media, social networking, small business

Should I Automate Social Media is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

Related posts:

1. How to Build Your Social Media Strategy
2. 10 Social Media Tasks You Can Outsource to Virtual Assistant
3. How is Social Media Used for Business?

But what really got me hooked on subscribing and reading all the updates (and some of the archives) is the goal-setting and goal-tracking that are at the core of this blog. At the beginning of each month, new goals are set and at the end of each month they are tallied, posted (along with the proof) and discussed.

Let me switch gears now a bit… I’m terrible at resolutions. Oh, I’ll make them with an abandon. And I”ll abandon them 15 minutes after I write them down. So I don’t do any of that stuff any longer (ok, maybe just a teeny-tiny bit here and there).

Instead, I set goals. I typically write them down on a piece of paper, breath a sigh of relief at finishing this list before the deadline (December 31) and that’s about as far as it goes. Ok, so maybe this is a slight exaggeration. But the point is that once the list is made, it is generally of little help.

Well, this year I’m trying something new for my goal-setting and so far it’s working. As a matter of fact, I’ve got quite a head-start on my goals. I got the idea and the motivation from Chris Brogan’s post, but then changed things around a bit and followed Amber Naslund’s most excellent step-by-step advice (her blog, by the way, is a treasure trove).

So here’s what I came up with (you can click on the image to view full-size):

I added a couple of columns that I thought were absolutely necessary for me, including Reference (I guess I better change the name to Notes) that stores notes and URLs of sites I can reference and use as I work on each task.

Since some of the tasks were one-time and others – recurring, I also needed a way of tracking them other than using the good old checkboxes. That’s why I included the Tracking column. One-time projects’ results are recorded in the One Time Status column.  And I plan on recording outcomes of recurring tasks in the monthly status columns.

As you can see from the screenshot, I got a bit of an early start with my list and got some of the work done last year (along with my new service packages).  

Now, here’s the goalbox for my blog:

The major change is that I’ve decided to concentrate more on participating in conversations others are hosting on their blogs. It is absolutely amazing how many fantastic blogs are out there! (Do you have one? Leave a link to it in the comments and I’ll stop by).

It’s not just fun and a good link-building tool (and admittedly, commenting is a lot more relaxing and less time-consuming than writing one’s own post from scratch). Turns out, it’s extremely effective in building one-on-one relationships.

I will continue writing my blog, but will post only once a week. I am somewhat of a speed turtle of blog post writing. So as I’m getting busier both in and outside of my business, I find that twice-weekly posting schedule is unsustainable. If you are a solo entrepreneur and/or a small-business owner, especially a stay-at-home and/or homeschooling parent, you can probably relate very well to this problem. But I hope that the quality of content will make up, at least somewhat, for the infrequency.

Technorati Tags: business blog, business goals

New Year Resolutions, Not Again! is a post from: 1Click Virtual Assistant

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