Archive for the ‘Social Media Marketing’ Category:
5 Handy Social Media Monitoring Tools for Bloggers
As a blogger, you’ll have to wear many hats. Spending time to plan your future posts, optimizing your website for the search engines, taking time to promote your posts, and engaging with your visitors are just a few things you will have to do. If you do a lot of these things by yourself, you are going to miss things. You don’t want to miss the coverage your blog gets (and the latest developments in your niche) in the social media. All bloggers should take time to monitor top social sites for story leads, things said about their brands, and everything in between. Thankfully, you won’t have to rely on the good old way of tracking things to keep up. There are many tools that can save you time tracking the social media. Here are 5 tracking tools to get you started:
Tweetwally: a very helpful tool that enables you to keep an eye out for topics that are important to you on Twitter. Pulls everything together and saves you time.
Twittorati: the name should ring a bell. This is Twitter meets Technorati. Bloggers can use this tool to find out about highly popular links. When you are stuck and have no idea what to write about, a trip to this site can help.
Tweetvisor: Tweetvisor is a powerful web-based solution that lets you manage your Twitter account more effectively. It makes it easy to manage your Twitter lists, gain more followers, keep track of what others are saying on Twitter, and even schedule future tweets.
How To Get The Most Out of LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn is one of the most underrated social networking websites around. It may not be as fun as Facebook and people on it may not be as talkative as those on Twitter, but it still offers a lot of value to those who are willing to pay attention to it. LinkedIn has plenty of features for bloggers to take advantage of. My favorite feature is LinkedIn Answers. It’s a great place to find what people are curious about and learn a few things in the process.
LinkedIn Answers lets you go through questions by category and find those that apply to your niche. While being able to answer people’s questions is gratifying, there is more to LinkedIn Answers. Here are just a few ways you can use LinkedIn Answers to your advantage:
- Drive Traffic To Your Website: it looks easier on paper. Once you have created that perfect profile on LinkedIn, you can use LinkedIn Q&A to get more traffic to your profile and your websites. Also, there is no shame in promoting your own work on LinkedIn as long as you are not spamming. If someone is asking for a service that you are offering, there is no reason not to reach out.
- Set Yourself Up as an Authority: how many people have you seen who claim to be social media gurus? You can call yourself anything. That does not mean that you actually are what you claim you are. If you want to establish yourself as an expert in your niche, one way to do it is to be very active on LinkedIn. Answer people’s questions in the best way possible, and you are on your way to getting the recognition you deserve. Read more »
Create Your Own Music with audiotool
So you know a thing or two about music and want to create your own music online? audiotool is just the tool for that. It has a social aspect to it too. Not only can you use this tool to create your own music, you can mix other people’s works and even follow people. Audiotool has plenty of elements that you can take advantage of to mix and come up with your very own music. Of course, you got to know what you are doing to get the most out of this service.
5 Killer Social Media Tools for Facebook Addicts
Many people are addicted to Facebook and other social media websites. If you spend a few hours each day updating your status on all these sites, you can consider yourself a social media addict. There is nothing wrong with being addicted to these sites as long as you can find a way to use them to your advantage. Talking about the latest movie you have seen or what you intend to do next year is fun, but you don’t want to spend hours of your valuable time doing those when you can try to think of ways to get the most out of social media.
Those of you who are addicted to Facebook should not forget about some of the Facebook tools that are around. Some of them can help you get more out of your Facebook account and save time in the process. In fact, here are 5 Facebook tools that let you do just that:
Pagemodo: gives you an easy way to create Facebook pages to promote your products and services. We are talking about dynamic pages with your videos and photos.
TabSite: a very cool tool that lets you add a website underneath a tab on your Facebook page. Great solution for businesses and those who want to add a landing page to their Facebook account. Read more »
Add a Social Bar to Your Blog with Apture
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One of the best ways to keep people from leaving your blog is by giving them what they are looking for on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a tool that made your site more dynamic and gave your visitors a set of additional tools to explore and share content with others. That’s exactly what Apture is all about. It’s a fun social bar that sits on the top of your blog and gives your visitors the tools they need to submit your pages to Facebook/Twitter or search across the Internet without leaving your website.
As you can see in the above screen-shot, Apture bar sits at the very top with links to Twitter and Facebook. The Javascript content explore on the right side makes it so easy for your visitors to search for content without leaving your website. Setting up Apture on your website is not that hard. All you have to do is customize the look and feel of your bar. You can even upload your logo if you wish. Read more »
How To Use Twitter For Blogging Ideas
Credit: jaylopez
Almost all bloggers that I know have had trouble coming up with new ideas for their blogs from time to time. Newbies have to deal with this issue more than experienced bloggers. These days, there are just so many tools that one can use to come up with new blogging ideas. You just have to learn how to use them. Twitter is one of those tools. It’s a powerful social network that connects you to the world and gives you access to millions of people. Many bloggers use Twitter to drive traffic to their blogs and push products. There is nothing wrong with that. Don’t forget that there is a lot of value in listening to what others have to say on Twitter. It’s not hard to miss things when you are the one who’s doing all the talking.
If you are ready to listen to what others have to say on Twitter, here are 5 ways you can use this network to come up with new ideas for your blog:
- Track top stories with Topsy: lots of Twitter fans use Tweetmeme to find the top stories in Twitterville. I personally prefer Topsy. It’s a powerful Twitter search engine that lets you find out what’s trending and what people are talking about online. It even shows you who the influential players are. Great tool to gather information for your next blog post.
- Ask Questions: if you are too impatient, you can just ask questions on Twitter. There are tools that let you share polls and questions with the Twitter community. Just make sure your question is to the point and something worth answering (that goes without saying).
- Track keywords: tools such as tweetbeep to keep track of your favorite keywords on Twitter just like you would on Google using Google Alerts. You’d be surprised how many ideas you can get by looking at your Twitter alerts. Read more »
7 Things Your Twitter Page Says About You
Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites around. It’s another tool that can be very valuable for bloggers if used the right away. Just like any other social network, there are numerous ways one can go about building a huge following. Lots of people have over 20,000 followers on Twitter. But quantity is not everything. You can almost tell what type of Twitterer you are dealing with by looking at someone’s Twitter page. The type of content that people share with others and the way they communicate with their tweeps say a lot about them. If you are planning to follow some quality folks on Twitter, you may as well look at their Twitter pages beforehand.
There are many ways to interpret one’s Twitter page. Here are a few obvious things that your Twitter page says about you:
- Are you communicating?: if you are constantly posting quotes and pictures to your Twitter page without taking time to communicate with others and respond to their questions, it’s going to show on your Twitter page. That’s not necessarily bad if you are tweeting valuable content for your followers. It’s definitely not the way to get the most out of your Twitter page.
- What you are offering: why are you tweeting?: You don’t do it for the sake of doing it. You have to offer something. Talking about what you have had for lunch or putting nonsense on your page (like spammers who take advantage of trending topics) is not going to be ideal.
- Replying to Others Questions: no matter what niche you are in, there are going to people who have questions about the topic you are writing about (if there aren’t, then you may be in too narrow of a niche). It’s nice to tweet things that you find valuable to your followers. But when someone asks you a question, you should take time to answer it properly.
- Spreading the love: Twitter is a social network. That means you get to do some networking on it. No brainer, right? One of the best way to find new friends and build relationships is by giving credit where its due. So do not hesitate to retweet stories that you find valuable. Read more »
Start a Quick Chat On Your Blog With Nurph
Have you ever been in a situation where you have wanted to host a chat about a specific blog post on your website but didn’t know how to get it done? Thanks to Nurph you can now turn any page into a Twitter chat room. All you have to do is provide Nurph with the URL of the page you want to send your visitors to and Nurph takes care of the rest. It puts a Twitter chat room on the top of that page and gives you an easy link to share with others you want to invite to your chat-room.
Here is how this site looks like when submitted to Nurph:
How To Get The Best Out of Facebook Social Plugins – Part I
Facebook has been growing quite rapidly in the past few months. There are no signs that the company is stopping anytime soon. In fact, with its latest announcement, Facebook has told the world that it is here to stay, and we all better get used to it. Facebook need not be your enemy if you are a blogger. Sure, I consider Facebook to be distracting and something that makes me less productive. At the same time, it does offer bloggers the opportunity to get the word out about their posts and build a more solid community around their blog.
Facebook’s Social Plugins program is a set of tools that are developed to help website owners bring more interactivity to their websites. Whether you are a blogger hoping for your readers to recommend your top posts or a portal owner interested in letting the world know about your top articles, Facebook has a tool for you. There are at least 8 ways you can integrate Facebook Social plugins into your blog and take it to the next level. In this post, I am going to focus on the standard boxes and buttons. But let’s not forget there are more advanced ways to bring Facebook to your website.
As a blogger, you want to make sure the word gets out about your posts on Facebook. You also want to create a Facebook fan page for your blog and push it on your blog. Facebook Social plugins not only enable you to do those, it also can recommend your top links to your readers and even allow your readers to comment on your blog using their Facebook account. To implement these features, you are going to need these 4 tools: Read more »
Create Your Own Dynamic Avatar with DoppelMe
I am not a big fan of using cartoons on my professional profiles, but you can always use cartoons to add some spice to your personal profiles on top social networking websites. DoppelMe is a very straight forward and cool tool to create your very own avatar and share it across your social networking profiles and websites. What’s fun about DroppelMe is the fact that it’s quite dynamic. So you can update your avatar’s look and have the changes take places in all your web properties.
The process is pretty simple. The service walks you through a wizard that lets you choose features and customize every aspect of your avatar. That includes the gender of your avatar, skin color, eye color, and other body parts. Read more »
