How to Get More Followers

A lot of people ask me what the key is to getting more followers on [fill in social media site here]. Surprisingly the answer is not that complicated. . .

Want more followers? Start posting great content.

I recently went to UC San Diego to see Guy Kawasaki speak about social media. Though the majority of his ideas I disagreed with (stay tuned for that blog post), what I did agree with is this: Sharing great content will help bring in new followers.

So, what does great content look like? There are three qualities that define great content:

1. Relevant: Content must be relevant to your target audience and their interests. For instance, if your target audience is photography enthusiasts, you should share content that will interest them.
2. Interesting: Social media users have many different options when it comes to where and who to get their content from. Your content has to be interesting, or you’re going to lose eyes. See this awesome article title “How to Write Interesting Content for a “Boring” Topic” on Copyblogger.
3. Timely: Social media posts perform the best when they are timely. If you/your brand becomes known for always having the most up-to-date, fresh stories, people will come to you first.

To find great content, follow relevant social media influencers, read lots of blogs and set Google Alerts for top keywords in your topic area. After a while it get’s easier!

As a note, simply putting content out into the universe will not bring in tons of followers. Conversing in one-on-one conversations with others is one of the best ways to grow your network. But great content helps.

What do you think makes “great” content?

Facebook Introduces “Graph Search”

(This blog originally appeared on Digitaria’s website.)

The social media world is buzzing this morning with the recent news of Facebook’s search update, Graph Search. As Facebook puts it, this is a “new way to navigate connections and make them more useful.” It’s a way to make new connections through your existing ones.

Graph Search allows users to search through a custom view of content that you and your friends have shared on Facebook. Unlike web search, Graph Search matches search phrases (such as “my friends in San Diego that like Mashable”) for results that include people, places, photos and other types of content being shared across your social connections on Facebook.

BUT what really makes this amazing is that Graph Search takes your immediate Facebook network and explodes it outward. Now users will also be able to search for “friends of friends” with common interests. With this, Facebook effectively knocks down the walls between users and their friends’ friends, and extended networks, making Facebook a much larger ecosystem of people you may not know yet, but have similar interest, likes and other common threads.

It may be difficult to visualize right now, but this is definitely also going to benefit brands and advertisers on Facebook. For brands, this opens up the possibility that their followers will have an even greater reach with shared content. For example, if one of brand X’s fans likes its page and then comments on one of its posts, that fan’s content can show up in a “friends of friends who like x” search. Instead of just reaching a fan’s immediate network, brands and advertisers now have the possibility of reach an extended network: friends of friends of fans.

Graph Search roles out to a select few in beta today. According to Facebook’s news release, the first version of Graph Search focuses on four main areas — people, photos, places, and interests:

People: “friends who live in my city,” “people from my hometown who like hiking,” “friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park,” “software engineers who live in San Francisco and like skiing,” “people who like things I like,” “people who like tennis and live nearby”

Photos: “photos I like,” “photos of my family,” “photos of my friends before 1999,” “photos of my friends taken in New York,” “photos of the Eiffel Tower”

Places: “restaurants in San Francisco,” “cities visited by my family,” “Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India,” “tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends,” “restaurants in New York liked by chefs,” “countries my friends have visited”

Interests: “music my friends like,” “movies liked by people who like movies I like,” “languages my friends speak,” “strategy games played by friends of my friends,” “movies liked by people who are film directors,” “books read by CEOs”

If you’re impatient (like me) and too excited to wait for wide release, you can also join the waitlist to try out the new search.

What do you think about this new feature?

 

Reputation Management: Yelp and Apple Maps Unite

Unless you live in a world completely disconnected from the media, you must have heard chatter about the newest iPhone and the subsequent software update ios 6. What you may have thought much about, however, is how Apple has stepped up the importance for reputation management in social media. 

The latest iPhone software update has integrated Apple Maps with Yelp profiles. Now, when you search for a location in your Apple Maps app on your iPhone, search results are accompanies by Yelp profiles.

Yelp ratings show up in location search results on Apple Maps

The platform even allows the user to browse through Yelp reviews without ever leaving the Apple Maps app.

Choose the “Reviews” tab to check out what others are saying

Hypothetically speaking, if I am in a new town and want to find a place to get a cup of coffee, I can go into the Apple Maps app and type “coffee” into the search bar. The search results will then show me the nearest places matching that description. I click on the closest one. It has an average rating of three stars, so I decide to learn more about it by checking out customer reviews. When I land on the tab, all I see is negative comments about how poor the service is and how overpriced the coffee is. Obviously I am going to choose to go somewhere else.

To someone who hasn’t worked with brick-and-mortar brands before, it may not be apparent at first the implications of this integration. The main take-aways are:

Monitoring is necessary. This integration makes it so that ever SMB and enterprise-level business needs to dedicate some resources to monitoring its Yelp profiles for negative reviews. Companies should also work to turn those negative reviews into a positive experience by addressing customer concerns and showing that your company cares.

Reviews can impact revenue. With this further integration of social and search, negative reviews have even greater impact to upset revenue. If customers are constantly unhappy and voice concerns, others will begin to avoid your store as well. Studies have shown that 70 percent of people trust online reviews–that can be a fairly devastating decline of in-store traffic OR a fantastic increase in traffic from positive reviews.

Locations need to embrace social media. The marriage of social media and search is an inevitable shift in the way we find and interact with brands. The companies that are going to win in search are those that embrace this idea and invest time in making their locations easy to find through search/social mechanisms.

This integration of Yelp in Apple Maps is just one way that search is being impacted and changed in social. Facebook has even teased at creating its own search capabilities.

Brands need to pay attention to how their reputation is being set on various social media platforms, and actively listen  and adjust to what is being said by customers. The only way to win in this scenario is to take every review seriously and position a company as one that genuinely cares what its customers think.

If you are interested in learning more about search and social, and how brands can utilize various tools to manage their online reputation, Like this blog post and I will write a follow up! 

The Evolution of Social: Search, CRM and Data

[Originally published on Digithoughts)

Right now is a good time to be a social media startup. With a growing emphasis on social ROI and keen interest from all industries in harnessing the power of social influencers, big companies are taking notice and quickly snatching up social media startups.

In 2011, Salesforce acquired social media platform Radian6. Earlier this year, Oracle acquired social marketing platform Vitrue and Google acquired Wildfire, a social marketing software developer. Just last week, search engine optimization giant SEOmoz announced their acquisition of Followerwonk, a social tool that measures influence of Twitter users, continuing the trend.

Moral of the story: Companies like Google and Oracle know that the future of social is search, CRM and data.

Beyond these acquisitions, we are already witnessing the effect of social’s growing importance in search. Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella recently released a study in conjunction with SEOmoz that revealed a correlation between social sharing of URLs and inbound links pointing to them. Whether this has a direct or major impact on search result rankings is still unclear, but some in the industry have their suspicions.

“I don’t think anyone really knows exactly how trending topics on social sites impact rankings – however, we’ve seen strong correlations between organic rankings and social signals, such as likes and shares,” Larry Kim, founder of WordStream, told MediaPost last week. “Whenever we have a new article with a decent amount of social interaction, it seems to catapult the page to the first page of results for keyword searches directly related to the post.”

And now, with search engine updates, like Bing’s social integration with Facebook and Twitter, and Google’s “Your World” results from Google+, search and social have grown increasingly dependent on who is doing the sharing. Enter the CRM function of social.

Platforms like Followerwonk and Klout are tools that help people identify influence in the social realm. Though not yet perfect, these tools give marketers the opportunity to find people who have the ability to get the social network buzzing (which, as mentioned earlier, could boost search rankings).

But aside from the possible SEO implications, what this type of software really gives a brand is the opportunity to build strong relationships with a target market. When Salesforce bought Radian6 for $326 million, they recognized the value of social conversations and saw the future importance of cultivating and monitoring these conversations. For example, studies show that 60 percent of brand followers on Twitter are more likely to recommend that brand, while 50 percent are more likely to actually buy that brand. We can expect to see more integration of CRM with social in the future, especially from Salesforce and Oracle, which will no doubt continue to buy out social startups.

Value must be quantified,  of course, which is why the data and analytics function of these social media tools have become so important. CMOs are increasingly spending more and more budget on social media each year. In fact, within the next five years, marketers expect to spend almost 20 percent of their budget on social media — nearly three times the current amount. With the increase in spending, CMOs are going to be hard-pressed to show ROI. Link tracking, change in customer sentiment and increase in engagement will become even more important; I suspect that companies are already trying to figure out how to make these more quantifiable.

The big questions now become: How will all these companies end up integrating the social startups into their platforms? How will these moves affect the way social campaigns are run in the future? We may find out sooner than later if the buy-out trend continues.

Hard Work Pays Off: A lesson in work ethic and finding balance

I thought I would take a break from social media and public relations today to offer up a mantra that has kept me going these past few years–“Hard work pays off.”

When I began working two jobs for a total of 40+ hours a week this summer, many people told me to take it easy, “You work too hard,” they told me. Maybe its just the old-school work ethic instilled in me by my hard-working parents, or maybe I am simply an idealist, but whenever someone says that I am working too hard, I have to shake my head. “No,” I say, “I am not working hard enough.”

Thousands of college students graduate each spring, looking for a way into the workforce. The reality is, less than half of them will actually find jobs right out of college, and many others will be forced to take internships before they can find full-time employment. Receiving a college degree no longer guarantees that you will find employment–those days are long gone.

In order to find a good job today, we need to work harder than ever before to get good experience and make those crucial network connections while still in school. We need to have more than one internship on our resume, prove to our employers that we can handle anything they throw at us and stand out from other applicants by demonstrating ability and dedication to succeed in the workforce.

So, what does it take to “work hard” and still have a life?

• Discipline: The ability to delegate time to multiple tasks is very important in public relations and marketing. If you are working at a firm, you will sometimes be responsible for more than four or five clients at one time, which means you need to figure out how to accomplish everything asked of you by your deadlines.
• Understanding your limits and how you work: Knowing when to give yourself a break and call it a night is important to the quality of work
• Saying ‘Yes’ more often than not. The way I see it, saying ‘no’ to your employes is a luxury. You have to put in your time and pay your dues before you can even think that word. This means that sometimes weekends need to be sacrificed when clients move up deadlines.
• Above all, Balance: If you value the personal relationships in your life, you will need to understand how to balance your work load with your personal life. Sometimes it can be tricky, and I can personally attest to the fact that it is not always easy, but it is extremely necessary.  Remember to take a weekend off once in a while, see your family, hang out with your friends, spend some quality time with your significant other. The way I see it, success means nothing if you don’t have people in your life to share it with.

When things get tough and you feel you are running out of steam, stop. Take a breath. And remind yourself, “Hard work DOES pay off.”

Kickstarter Tips for Success

(Disclaimer: I originally wrote this blog post for Olive PR Solutions, Inc.)

Need money fast? Turn to the crowd! Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter again takes center stage in the press with a creative and impressively successful campaign by Penny Arcade. With the promise of an ad-free site, Penny Arcade raised $200,000 in two days and hopes to reach $1 million by mid-August.

While this type of wild success is rare, plenty have played the odds. Out of more than 64,000 Kickstarter projects to date, approximately 44 percent were funded, according to a recent CNN article.

SOLO Eyewear, a San Diego sunglasses startup that donates a pair of prescription glasses or sight-saving eye surgery for every pair of shades sold, is part of the lucky minority that has had a successful campaign with Kickstarter. Exceeding its original goal, SOLO Eyewear ended up raising more than $30,000 in one month.

So, how do you up your chances for a successful campaign like SOLO Eyewear or Penny Arcade’s Kickstarter campaign?

The first thing you need is enticing rewards. The key to offering awesome rewards is knowing your audience and matching their wants with what you can realistically give for their contribution. Penny Arcade is offering rewards that surely have the web comic’s readers digging in their couches for loose change. The list of rewards for Kickstarter backers includes being immortalized in a new video game, to hanging out with the Penny Arcade crew for a night.

SOLO Eyewear cleverly used their Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell their summer collection of sunglasses. By offering sunglasses and swag at different levels, SOLO effectively mobilized their fan base and gave them the motivation to give money, get shades and change lives.

The second factor that plays into a successful Kickstarter campaign is timing. Penny Arcade launched right before Comic Con. They even campaigned a bit at the conference, according to CNN Money. Before you launch, think about the timeline of the campaign. Are there any big conferences that pertain to your company that you can plan around? Are there any holidays or special events that you can hook into to advertise your campaign? Strategy is key in any crowdfunding campaign.

And on the topic of strategy, one of the most valuable components to a Kickstarter campaign is publicity. Penny Arcade’s Kickstarter campaign has no doubt been helped by the fact that CNN, Mashable, Geekwire, and many other national and industry-specific publications have covered it.

For lesser known companies like SOLO Eyewear, social media plays a huge role in building that awareness aspect for a successful crowdfunding campaign. SOLO Eyewear used Facebook to reach out beyond its immediate circle by appealing to existing fans and followers to spread the word about their Kickstarter campaign. By providing frequent campaign progress updates and enticing followers to help reach the next level of funding with promises of style and color reveals, SOLO Eyewear drew significant traffic to its Kickstarter page from Facebook.

So, what’s the moral of the story? Be strategic, be creative and plan ahead, and your Kickstarter campaign could be just as successful as that of Penny Arcade and SOLO Eyewear.

Want a job? Get on Social Media

Social media recruiting is becoming common practice for human resource departments across the U.S., according to a recent study by Jobvite.

With 92 percent of respondents indicating that they plan to use or are using social media to find and hire job candidates this year, its safe to say that if you want a job its time to get social. But where are these employers looking, you may ask?

• 93 percent turn to LinkedIn (89 percent have made a hire)
• 66 percent are using Facebook (26 percent have made a hire)
• 54 percent are using Twitter (15 percent have made a hire)

Before you rush to their Facebook pages and tear down the photos from Saturday nights pub crawl, you may be interested in what recruiters are really peeved about. While 47 percent of respondents indicated a negative reaction to alcohol consumption on an applicants social media profile, 54 percent of respondents indicated that bad grammar and spelling mistakes were even larger hiring deterrents.

But that’s not to say that if you use proper grammar in your Facebook statuses and then post a picture of yourself in a bikini that you’re in the clear. In fact, you may want to think twice before posting those Vegas photos.

• 78 percent of recruiters had a negative reaction to illegal drug references
• 67 percent were turned off by posts of a sexual nature

Moral of the story? If you’re looking for a job, you need to clean up your social footprint right now. There is a 92 percent chance that your future employer is looking for you right now on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

For more results from Jobvite study fill out a quick request form on the company website.