How To Get More Out of Your Community with Wibiya
So you want to build your very own super community? One of the best ways to do that is by creating your own blog and adding only top notch content to it. That’s simplifying the matter. If you are passionate about blogging and take the time to engage your community and provide them more value, there is no reason you can’t grow your community and move your blog to the next level.
One of the best ways to get people more involved on your blog is by giving them a way to communicate and connect with your other online presences. Let’s say you have a fan page or a Twitter account for your blog. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get your blog visitors to connect with you on Twitter and Facebook as well? That’s where Wibiya comes in. It’s a cool toolbar system that you can install on your blog to communicate with your visitors more effectively. It comes with all kinds of apps that you can add to your toolbar to bring your online presences to your toolbar without too much trouble.
Wibiya is one flexible service. It not only allows you to add all kinds of widgets to your toolbar, it also makes it possible to run these apps from your website, hence keeping the visitors’ attention on your blog and your content.
Build a Social Media Bar with Skysa
In case you have been surfing the Web a lot lately, you may have seen those sites that take advantage of footer bar to promote social media profiles and related RSS feeds. Thanks to services such as Skysa, you can build your own social media bar and give your visitors more ways to interact with your website and connect with you on social networking websites.
Skysa footer bars essentially add a task-bar to your website. So your users can open up different windows on your website and even join your chat-room. Designing your own Skysa is not that difficult. All you have to do is provide your information and pick the design you feel fit your website’s layout the best.
FollowBase: Customer Support Via Twitter
Being involved on Twitter is more than posting philosophical quotes or retweeting what others have to say. Twitter is an extremely powerful tool for businesses who know how to use it. There are plenty of ways that businesses can get value out of Twitter. They can listen to what people have to say about their niche and pick up ideas for future ideas. They can also track their reputation on Twitter. Best of all, they can provide real-time support to customers via Twitter. That’s where Followbase comes in. It’s an interesting service that lets you get in touch with other companies’ support teams and get help via Twitter.
FollowBase is pretty simple to work with. It’s essentially designed to help people get the support they need via Twitter. If you happen to be a business owner, you can just add your company by entering the Twitter account for your business. The fun part starts when you claim your forum on FollowBase. That will allow you to communicate with your customers more effectively and keep the spammers out as well. (more…)
Social Media: Knowing It vs. Doing It
The number of social media experts is on the rise. In fact, that number may be growing as fast as the number of new blogs. There are a lot of people who are looking for new ways to market themselves to employers and their clients. Being a social media expert (or claiming it) is certainly one way to gain some extra attention. But social media is not about what you claim you know. It’s not even about what you do know. It’s more about what you can do with the knowledge you have.
You can be an expert in Google Wave or Twitter. You may know all the commands and even spend hours everyday playing with these services. But if you don’t know how you can provide value to your company through these services, you are not really an expert. There are too many people who spend their time going to conferences, picking up industry jargon, and claiming things that are not necessarily true. These won’t really make you an expert in the field of social media nor does the fact that you can set up a blog by yourself.
Blippy: Share What You Buy
We have seen a lot of social networking websites emerge out of nowhere in the past few months. They all you to share all kinds of information with the world. You can get to share your favorite books, lists, videos, and more with the world. With Blippy, you get to share what you are buying and where you are buying it from with the world. I know. Why would you want to share what you are buying online with others. Maybe it is to get feedback or show others what stores you are supporting. Whatever the case, the idea can be certainly interesting.
3 Ways to Add Your Blog Feed To Your Facebook Pages
There are a lot of small businesses that are starting the realize the power of communities such as Facebook and Twitter. It’s true that a lot of them don’t have time to get down to the nitty gritty and be fully involved in these communities. But having a presence on these websites is a good start. Facebook is one of the top dogs among social networking services, and it’s got a great potential to help small businesses take their business to the next level. But as good as Facebook is, it comes with one of the most unintuitive interfaces that I have seen. Whether the company is keeping complicated and hard to figure out on purpose is beside the point. But there are a lot of simple tasks that are not so simple to get done on Facebook.
Feeding your blog to your Facebook pages could be a hassle. You certainly want to share your blog posts with the world, but you may not want your posts to show up on your personal profile. So you need to be careful before adding your blogs to Facebook. There are plenty of apps that help you get the word out about your blog posts, and Facebook also has built-in features to help you do that. Here are 3 ways that I would go about adding my blog RSS to a Facebook page:
1. Facebook notes: this is a pretty straight forward way to import your blog on to you Facebook page. What you want to do here is log on to your page and click on the edit page button at the top left of your screen. From there, you want to choose your note’s setting option and edit your import settings on the very next page. Not very straight forward, but it gets the job done.
Sponsored Tweets: Getting Paid for Tweets?
You know it was bound to happen. Twitter has been looking at multiple ways to generate revenue and take its business to the next level. So are tweeters. Sponsored Tweets is a cool service that brings advertisers and Twitter publishers together and let tweeters make money from their sponsored tweets while enabling advertisers to reach out to influential users in the community to push their message out. Here is how the service works. Advertisers create opportunities and tweeters take advantage of these opportunities to make money on Twitter. You will need to disclose that you are being sponsored by someone so the transparency is there. Here is a demonstration of how this service works:
When I first heard about this service, I was very skeptical about it. I am by no means a big fan of advertising on Twitter with my own tweets. Twitter is not a direct revenue channel for me or my business, but it is a great traffic driver for our products and the content our company produces. I have to say I was surprised by the number of celebrity and popular twitterers who are taking advantage of this service to make a few bucks online. If you happen to be into advertising on Twitter, this service can certainly come in handy.
Think about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get the message out about your product to thousands of folks on Twitter by partnering up with a Twitter user who has 200,000 followers? Maybe you want to work with someone who has millions of followers. Those sponsored tweets will cost you but just think about the number of people who will instantly check your product and may even give you feedback on your work. (more…)
4 Cool Tools To Automate Twitter Work
There are plenty of Twitter automation tools around. These days you can automate anything from sending messages, planning direct messages, and more with your Twitter account. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it. There is such a thing as Black-Hat and White-Hat tweeting. Have you wondered why you get unsolicited messages on Twitter when you talk about topics such as VOIP or Web hosting? There are a lot of people who make a living out of selling these services to others, and Twitter is their next playground. Some have gone even beyond that and send you harmful links wrapped within an innocent @reply. So there are a lot of things that you shouldn’t automate or do no Twitter. But small businesses can certainly benefit from outsourcing some of their Twitter tasks. You don’t want to everything by yourself and lose sight of what really matters.
If you are looking to manage multiple accounts, vet followers, or find suitable people to follow, the following 4 Twitter automation tools come in handy:
Tweet Adder: one of the most powerful and controversial Twitter automation tools on the market. Let’s you do all kinds of research on Twitter and even find friends to follow fast. The controversial feature (auto-follow) is best left to black-hats. But there are a lot of positive things you can get done with Twitter including but not limited to deep research, account management, and friend management.
TwitterFeed: one of the best tools out there if you want to automate feeding your blog to Twitter. You can not only define how often your want your feeds to be posted, you can also define tags for your posts. Your clicks are tracked as well which is a big plus. It’s a free tool.
Humming Bird: comes with everything you need to manage multiple accounts, add friends, and find targeted followers. The service is quite smart and makes following and unfollowing people less of a pain. Basically, it helps you find and friend people who you have not unfollowed before and set yourself up as an authority twitter figure.
Social Oomph: a very handy service that enables you to manage your twitter accounts and connect them to your blogs easily. You can also use it to find people to follow, set up direct messages, unfollow people when they unfollow you, and much more.
If you are planning to abuse the above services, let’s hope you get suspended soon. But if you are truly interested in saving time and effort and build a real Twitter presence, the above tools come in handy. They don’t do everything for you, but they do save time.
5 Tools To Manage Your Social Media Identity
There are plenty of social networking sites and services that one can be a part of. Yes. We have Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and Technorati. But there are plenty of more to be a part of. It all comes down to your niche. There are many businesses who have their own dedicated team of social media warriors who manage their presences across multiple networks. But if you don’t have the resources to hire your own team, you can always use social media tools to your advantage to get things done faster. Social media identity tools don’t do your updates for you, but they do let you find user-names and manage your profiles more effectively. So they do save some time in the process.
If you are looking for a set of tools to manage your social media profiles more effectively, here are 5 services you should try:
KnowEm?: a cool service that lets you find out and reserve your user-names across popular social networking websites. It’s much easier when you can do it all from one place.
Namechk: another useful tool that lets you figure out whether your favorite user-name is available on social networking sites of your choice. Of course, your favorite username should be your brand.
7 Informative Social Media Books Worth Reading
The social media business is a very dynamic one. It’s developing and growing fast, and there are always opportunities to learn how to do things right and grow your business more effectively using the social media. There are plenty of books out there that promise you unreasonable things without providing you with the tips and theory you need to truly “get” social media. Whether you are new to this world or just want to hone your skills, you want to pick up books that are worth your while and provide you with tips you can implement in your business. Here are 7 very informative social media books that do just that:
The Social Media Bible: if you are new to the social media or just don’t know whether you have been using it to your full advantage, this book is a must read. Provides you with a good overview of what may work for your business.
The New Community Rules – Marketing on the Social Web: if you have been taking advantage of the social media without getting any results, you may want to take a look at this book. It may have the solutions for you.
The Social Media Marketing Book: an easy to understand guide that will show you how your business can take advantage of blogs, social networking sites, and beyond. Great for beginners.
Socialnomics: a very good book on theory. It shows you how the idea of “social” has changed the way companies do business. Shows you how successful businesses are taking advantage of those top social media services.