Image credt: Steven Shorrock

One of the most common arguments I hear to support the “every business should be on social media” discussion is that people are talking about your brand whether you know it or not.

But is it true? Well, there’s really only one way to find out. And that is to listen.

Introduction to Social Media Listening

Social media listening tools are online services that search social media sites for keywords that you input into their system. If your keywords are mentioned on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook (in some cases) or other social media sites, the listening tool with capture the message and display it in a stream for you to view.

Listening tools come in many forms, ranging from free lightweight versions to very expensive enterprise editions.

Why Should I Use a Social Media Listening Tool?

Here are three reasons every business should use a social media listening tool:

1. To Interact with Customers

You can’t be a part of a conversation if you don’t know it’s happening. With listening tools, you don’t need to be informed about when or where a discussion will take place. The tool will let you know, in real-time, who is talking about your brand and exactly what they are saying. Don’t you want to know what is being said about your brand? Wouldn’t you like to interject when there is misinformation or a negative conversation happening? By participating in these conversations, you may be able to take a negative situation and turn it into positive word of mouth.

2. To Find New Customers

I recently tweeted, “If any local restaurants are listening, I will eat lunch at your place in Nashville today.” It was an open invitation for a business to invite me in as a new or repeat customer. I didn’t place any budget or genre restrictions in my tweet. I included keywords such as restaurant, lunch and Nashville in my message, hoping that a savvy local business would be listening and respond. Unfortunately, they did not.

Ask yourself, “What would my potential customers say online about the product or service I offer?” Add all of your answers to a listening tool. Keep the phrases short and to the point. “Need a mechanic” or “car broke down” would be great options for a local auto shop to use with a tool that offers filtering by location.

Think like your potential customers. If you can find them, you may be able to convert them.

3. To Diffuse Crisis Situations

If someone walks into your office and says, “Did you see the negative blog post about our company this morning?” then it’s too late. Your colleagues heard about it before you, which means it is likely spreading across the internet rapidly. And you had no idea.

If you had a listening tool and were paying close attention to it, you could have seen the blog post immediately after it was posted, asked the author to speak with you, and corrected or resolved the situation before it spread too far.

You don’t want to be the last to know that a crisis is coming. A listening tool can prevent this from happening.

Getting Started

If you’re brand new to social media listening, I reccommend using Social Mention. It works like Google. You can do a search for what is currently being said about the keyword you enter or you can set up alerts to be notified periodically. You can also limit the search to specific social networks if you want to tackle one source at a time to prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed.

Social media listening can be a valuable tool for your organization. Start with a free tool and invest in something more robust like Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Sysomos if your budget allows it.

Image credit: Andrea Vergata

Before you create any social media profiles for your business, you should have a thorough strategy in place. Social media will affect every dimension of your business, from marketing to customer service. However, it’s not as much about how you would like to use it as much as how your customers (and potential customers) need you to use it.

This post will discuss the PyroMarketing method for the marketing aspect of your social media strategy.

PyroMarketing is a term coined by Greg Stielstra in his book PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life. Written in 2005, it is arguably more applicable today than it was when he wrote it.

The Four Steps of PyroMarketing

The four steps are:

1. Gather the driest tender
2. Touch it with a match
3. Fan the flames
4. Save the coals

Let’s dig into what each of these steps mean.

1. Gather the Driest Tender

Gather the driest tender is another way of saying promote to the people most likely to buy without resistance. Marketers that use traditional advertising waste a lot of money reaching people that aren’t interested in what they are selling. Fortunately, there are many opportunities to reach a highly targeted audience online.

To discover your driest tender, do an analysis of your current customers. If you don’t have this data already, put a survey on your website. How old are they? Where do they live? What are their interests?

Once you collect this data and analyze your customers, you can cross-reference the results with social media research such as this 2012 study by Pew. You will discover what social media activities your audience is interested in. With this information in hand, you can make an educated decision about how your business should participate in social media.

2. Touch it With a Match

Touch it with a match means to give your potential customers an experience with your product or service.

For online services, such as a members-only website or a social media management tool, this is pretty straightforward. Offer a free trial. Let them use the product to solve their problems. Not only is a hands-on experience more likely to lead to a sale than any other marketing activity, but you will gather valuable information about potential customers during the sign-up process.

If you offer tangible goods, it’s still possible to provide the experience through social media. Sell cars? Post a video walk-through of your vehicles. Are you an author? Post updates with compelling lines for your book. Do you run a boutique? Post pictures of a model wearing some items from your latest shipment. While the customer will not have a direct experience, these types of activities will help them identify with what you are selling.

A few other ways you can use social media to provide an experience:

• Giveaways – Give your products to people through contests
• Deep discounts/coupons – Drive foot traffic to a physical location or website to encourage a personal experience
• How-to content - Show people not only how to use your products, but exactly how they will benefit

The principle is to let your customers decide for themselves. They aren’t likely to trust you. Letting them discover how great your product is on their own will likely lead to word-of-mouth marketing.

3. Fan the Flames

To fan the flames means to equip people with the tools they need to spread what you are selling. When you fan the flames, the fire becomes hotter.

As I said in a recent blog post, place sharing buttons everywhere on your website. Okay – not everywhere – but make sure they are prominently featured. If a customer wants to tell their networks about your product, make it easy for them! Oh, and be sure to include the number of shares beside each button. When people see that others have shared something, they are more likely to do it. This is called social proof.

Don’t forget that people respond to incentives. Offer a coupon to everyone who writes a blog post or status update about your product. Providing pre-written messages or talking points is a great way to make it easy for them.

You should also invite your best customers to be a part of an exclusive community or to join an exclusive email list. Seed these customers with the newest information about your product, and let them share it with their friends. If they feel like they are a part of something, you will keep their attention and their desire to help you.

It’s easy to think of a social network as one large group of people. In reality, social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, are a bunch of smaller networks of people. These smaller networks connect people who either have offline relationships or common interests. They have likely developed some level of trust between one another. If you can get small groups to adopt your message, it will likely continue to spread.

4. Save the Coals

To save the coals means to keep a database of your existing customers so you can reach them again.

Fortunately, social networks make this easy. As long as the network exists and you maintain a profile for your business, you will not lose your fans or followers (unless you make them angry or bore them).

However, I would suggest cross promoting your email list, which is usually a database you have control over. If you’re fortunate enough to have a CRM tool, then add the social profiles of your customers to the database.

Closing Thoughts

I need to emphasize that marketing should only be one aspect of your comprehensive social media strategy. If you try to use social media as a digital billboard for your business, you will fail. Focus on human relationships first. Earn the right to market to your audience. Then only do it when the time is right.

The book obviously provides a much more in-depth description of this method. I’ve adapted it and applied social media tactics to it. Whether you manage social media or have a broader marketing role, I highly suggest reading it. It’s available on Amazon.

Image credit: Alaska Library Association

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could view all of your favorite blogs in one place and be notified when they post new updates? It sounds too good to be true, but you can.

An Introduction to RSS

RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary (or Really Simple Syndication), is a technology used on websites to allow readers to subscribe to the latest content available. This stream of new information is called an RSS feed. To subscribe to an RSS feed, you must use an RSS reader.

Here’s the definitions you’ll need to understand:

• RSS – Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication
• RSS feed – A stream of new content that is posted on a website (new articles or blog posts, for instance)
• RSS reader (or feed reader) – The tool that website and blog readers use to suscribe to and read an RSS feed

How To Start Reading Blogs With An RSS Reader

The first step is to sign up for an RSS reader. Google Reader is one of the most popular feed readers available (and it’s free). If you have a Gmail account, the signup process is as simple as entering your email credentials at the link I provided.

It would be impossible to cover the signup process for the wide variety of RSS readers available, so this article makes the assumption that you can complete this step without my help. However, I will use screenshots for Google Reader below.

If you have successfully signed up for Google Reader, you should see a page that looks like this (click to enlarge):

Google Reader

Subscribe to your first RSS feed

In Google Reader, there is a red ‘Subscribe’ button in the left sidebar. Click this button. A box will pop up below the button that says “Enter a search term to find feeds or paste a feed url.” Do not worry if you do not know the feed URL – Google Reader is pretty smart and can automatically find the feed URL for most domains. Just enter the normal URL of the website you’d like to receive updates from.

Subscribe in Google Reader

After you have entered the URL, click ‘Add’.

If Google has successfully discovered the RSS feed, your reader will refresh with the content of the feed in the right column. In the left column, two things should have changed: ‘All items’ should be bold because you have 10 unread posts. At the bottom of the left column under ‘Subscriptions’, the title of the site or feed should be red with a (10) beside it.

Google reader automatically pulls in the 10 most recent posts when you subscribe to a new feed. The only way this number will be lower is if the site does not have at least 10 new posts.

 What if Google Reader doesn’t find the feed?

In rare cases, Google Reader may not find the feed you are looking for. Or, perhaps, you don’t want every update from the site, but just the updates from a particular category. In these scenarios, you will need to find the direct URL to the RSS feed. Here’s how to do that:

1. Look for the RSS icon

Many blogs and websites use an orange icon to link to their RSS feed. It will probably look something like this (though typically smaller):

RSS Logo

Find this icon and click on it. It will take you to the raw RSS feed that looks similar to this:

Raw RSS Feed

If the website has an RSS feed provided by a third-party service, you may also land on a formatted page that you can read. Either one is fine; but be prepared to see code like I’ve posted above.

2. Copy the feed URL

When you find the RSS feed, copy the URL from the address bar of your browser window. Here are two examples of feed URLs:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/johncade/feed
  
• http://johncade.com/?feed=rss

3. Paste the URL in the ‘Subscribe’ box in Google Reader

As in our previous step, paste the direct feed URL into the ‘Subscribe’ box in Google Reader. Your reader should refresh with the most recent items from the feed URL you entered.

A Few Things to Note

You can subscribe to as many blogs or websites as you wish in Google Reader. However, not every website will offer RSS feeds (though this is fairly uncommon). Also, once you have Google Reader set up, you can connect your account to many deskop, tablet and smartphone applications. In most cases, you will only need your Google credentials to make the connection.

Using an RSS reader is a great way to increase your productivity. Rather than visiting several websites per day, you can view content from all of them in one place.

Image credit: uwgb admissions

Even if you are not a social media user, you’ve probably seen a hashtag. The anatomy of a hashtag is a pound sign (#) followed by a word. They look like #this. Hashtags are commonplace on television shows, billboards and have even been used in printed magazines to encourage people to use them online. They are most commonly used on Vine, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram as a way to categorize posts.

Proper Form

Before we dive into common mistakes, let’s take a look at a hashtag used properly. A well-crafted tweet that uses a hashtag looks something like this:

Here’s a great resource for writing magnetic headilnes - http://urlgoeshere #blogging

The author of this post lets people know that this tweet falls into the general category of blogging.

Why Hashtags are Important

Hashtags give context to the content of your post. On Vine, for instance, using the hashtag #Nashville will help my followers understand where my six-second video was recorded.

In addition to context, hashtags on Vine, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram are clickable, allowing your followers to find similar posts about the same topic.

Lastly, hashtags provide a way to have a public and organized discussion. If you’ve ever seen a flood of tweets from someone you follow, and each one uses the same hashtag, it may be because they are participating in a Twitter chat or are at a live event. The hashtag allows other people to identify a discussion they may want to be a part of.

Common Hashtag Mistakes

While hashtags are generally easy to use, they are just as easy to abuse. Here’s a list of five common mistakes hashtag users make:

1. Breaking Hashtags with Punctuation

As a general rule, always remember that punctuation breaks hashtags. It is a common misconception that any characters following the pound sign that are not separated by a space will be clickable. This is not true. Here’s an example of a broken hashtag:

#blogging-for-profit

Only the word blogging will be hyperlinked to a stream of other posts. Anything following the first hyphen will show up as text that is not clickable, and therefore not actually part of the hashtag.

As with any rule, there is at least one exception. Our friend, the underscore, can be used in hashtags. As a possible solution to our broken hashtag above, we could replace the hyphens with underscores:

#blogging_for_profit

Just because something is permissible, however, does not make it beneficial. Like URLs with dashes, hashtags with underscores are not best practice. I avoid using underscores in hashtags whenever possible. They are hard to remember, hard to type (especially on a phone) and therefore hard for other people to adopt.

2. Using Too Many Hashtags

Hashtags can extend the reach of your post beyond your list of followers. It can be tempting to pack as many hashtags into a Tweet as possible to reach more people, like this:

Here’s a great resource for writing magnetic headlines – http://urlgoeshere #blogging #bloggingforprofit #headlines #socialmedia #resource #wordpress

This is spammy. Stick with no more than three hashtags to avoid annoying your followers.

3. Using Hashtags That Are Too Long

There are two reasons why long hashtags are not a good idea. The first is that reading long hashtags is like reading a run-on sentence. They’re hard to read, and there is only a small chance that others users will care to use them. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Twitter doesn’t allow you to use more than 140 characters for a tweet. You should save characters where can – unless, of course, #YoureJustUsingALongHashtagForFun.

Keep your hashtags as short as possible.

4. Being Redundant

Another common mistake is posting a tweet that includes a hashtag of a word mentioned earlier in the tweet. Here’s an example:

I really enjoy blogging about social media. #blogging

To save characters and avoid being redundant, this should be rewritten as:

I really enjoy #blogging about social media.

5. Not Using PascalCase

PascalCase is a term most often used in web development to describe how phrases with multiple words but no spaces are joined with capital letters. It is just as applicable to hashtags. Let’s take a look at an example:

#thishashtagdoesnotusepascalcase

This hashtag is extremely hard to read. It’s hard to tell where each word begins. Now let’s take a look at one that uses PascalCase:

#ThisHashtagDoesUsePascalCase

Aside from the fact that this hashtag is too long, it is much easier to read than the previous example. If you ever use more than one word in a hashtag, do everyone a favor and use PascalCase.

What About Hashtags on Facebook?

You may see hashtags in your Facebook news feed from time to time. This is likely because one of your friends is posting to Facebook from Vine, Instagram or Twitter.

Hashtags have not been adopted by Facebook and therefore do not function as they do on the sites listed above. They are not clickable.

In short: don’t use hashtags on Facebook.

You’re All Set

You now know how to use hashtags without making five common mistakes. Have you seen any other mistakes that people make when using them? List them in the comments below.

Photo credit: pshab

Marketing and social media professionals are often tasked with measuring audience growth month-to-month or year-over-year. Facebook allows you to view the number of Likes you had at any point in the past, dating back to July 19, 2011.

Finding Facebook Insights for Your Page

To find Facebook Insights for a Page you manage, visit the page and look for the ‘Show’ button at the top. If there are new notifications for your page, a number will appear inside of a bright red box. It should look like this:

When you click ‘Show’, your full Admin Panel will be exposed. In the center of the lower half of the Admin Panel, there is a section labeled ‘Insights’ with a graph below it. Hovering over the lines on the graph will show you some statistics about your page. However, to find a historical record of Likes, you must click ‘See All’. This will take you to another page.

The Insights section of the Admin Panel

Facebook Insights Overview

After clicking ‘See All’ from the Admin Panel on your Facebook Page, you are taken to the Facebook Insights Overview page. Using the navigation on this page, you can find several pieces of information, including:

• Which of your posts were the most viral
• The geographic area that represents the largest number of Likes on your page
• How many people your page has reached
• Several other statistics

However, we are looking for one simple piece of information: the number of Likes on any given day since July of 2011.

The Step-By-Step Process for Finding Historical Facebook Page Likes

While you are able to look at information about your Likes in 89 day increments (or less) using Facebook Insights, there is no quick way to identify the total number of Likes on any given day. To do this, Facebook requires you to download a spreadsheet.

Here are the steps to create and download your spreadsheet:

1. Locate and click the Export Data button on any page in the Facebook Insights section – it’s near the top
2. In the pop-up window that appears, select “Page Level Data” under Select Data Type, “Excel (.xls)” under Select File Format, and the date range you would like to view
3. Click Download
4. Find the downloaded spreadsheet on your computer and open it (the file name starts with ‘Facebook Insights’)
5. Look at Column H for ‘Lifetime Total Likes’

Column H will show you how many Likes you had for each day you selected in your date range.

The pop-up for exporting insights data.

Take a Deeper Dive Into Insights

I hope this post helped you find you need. However, I would encourage you to regularly visit your Facebook Page Insights to evaluate the performance of your posts and to better understand who your audience is. Someone once said:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

The number of Likes you have is one of the least actionable pieces of information Insights provides. Take a look at what type of posts perform well and the demographics of your Likes. These two pieces of information will help you tailor your posts to drastically improve engagement.

Image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Most people do not join social networks to reach millions of people, but to connect with friends, family and people that have common interests.

There are people on Twitter, however, that try to make a name for themselves, their blogs or their businesses. Regardless of which category you are in, this Twitter tip should help you understand how to better communicate with your followers.

The Mistake Many People Make

It’s amazing how intricate the functionality of Twitter really is. Most people find it to be a very simple and easy-to-use tool. For the most part, it is! However, this mistake is common and can be the difference between reaching 1 and 100,000 people.

Consider this tweet that one of my fictional followers posted for his friends:

@socialcade has a blog about it all. Check it out! http://johncade.com

Here’s the full list of people who will see this tweet:

• Me
• Any of our mutual followers
• Anyone that visits his Twitter profile

While his gesture is nice, it is essentially ineffective. Twitter does not show you @ replies to all of your followers. Therefore, his tweet is hidden from the very people he wanted to reach.

The Workaround

Assuming that you are short on available characters and need to mention a username at the beginning of a Tweet, the simplest solution is our punctual friend, the period. While any character will work, I choose the period because it seems to be the most common approach.

Let’s revisit the tweet from above. If the person following me wants to reach all of his friends with this tweet, he should use this format:

.@socialcade has a blog about it all. Check it out! http://johncade.com

In this specific example, and perhaps of many of your own tweets, it could be rewritten altogether. For instance, he could tweet:

Check out @socialcade’s blog about it all! http://johncade.com

I always try to re-word the tweet if possible to avoid confusion. Even when using a period at the beginning, some of the followers who read it might not think the message is intended for them.

Both of the examples above increase your reach exponentially. Rather than just a handful of people seeing what you tweet, everyone that follows you will see it.

Final Thoughts

It isn’t necessary to use the techniques I’ve shared if you’re having a short conversation with a friend. If the discussion does not add value to everyone that follows you, then do not fill their streams with your replies.

If you’ve ever seen the people you follow make this mistake, you can tweet this post using the button below.