All Entries Tagged With: "social networking"

Google Friend Connect Or Facebook Connect? Which Is Right For You?

Everyone seems to be comparing two new social networking applications – Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. I haven’t tried the latter, but I have tried the former. But this post isn’t about which is better. It’s about which is better for you.

How do you decide whether you should use Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect for your blog? Or neither? First, ask yourself this question, “Would having your very own social network aid your target audience?”

If the answer to that question is yes then you’ve taken the first step.

Now you just have to decide whether Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect is a better choice. Either way, it’s a big step and you should know what you are getting into. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Are you a member of Facebook and are you active there?
• Do you see a need for Facebook and would it improve your networking any?
• How are your technical skills?
• Do you have it in your budget to hire a developer to help you set up a social network?
• Is your target audience using Facebook?

If your answer to any of these questions is negative then you shouldn’t bother with Facebook Connect. You should use Google Friend Connect instead. Here’s why:

• Google Friend Connect is easier to install for the average user.
• Facebook Connect is proprietary and if neither you nor your target audience can benefit from networking through Facebook it just doesn’t make sense to use their service because you can’t use it with any service other than Facebook; Google Friend Connect, by contrast, is open source and therefore provides the ability to network across multiple websites.
• Even if your technical skills are not that great, if your audience is on Facebook and you have the budget to pay a developer to install Facebook Connect for you then it could pay off in the long run (you need to be where your audience is).

Social networking is here to stay. Thanks to both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, niche websites can get in on the niche social networking action now. To find sites that use Google Friend Connect, visit Friend Connectified.

Twitter Tips: Just A Little Friendly Advice

After Twittering for a couple of months I’ve got a few tips on how to best use Twitter for some effective marketing:

• First, add valuable information, not trivia
• Shorten your long URLs because you only have 140 characters
• Don’t spam – you won’t get link juice from your tweets any way
• Don’t make your tweets short sales come ons
• Be selective choosing your friends and the people you follow
• Manage your time; it’s addicting
• Don’t follow everyone who follows you
• Don’t just click on any link; some people hide malware with short URLs
• Brand yourself with your company name as your Twitter profile
• Block spammers

Twitter is a useful tool, but it is a tool. Know its limitations and don’t expect miracles. You can increase your reach with Twitter, but it doesn’t happen overnight.

Brought to you by Blog Content Provider.

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Why I’m Killing My Facebook Friends

I’ve been deleting my Facebook friends. The reason is pretty simple. I’ve discovered that the best way to go about social networking online is the same way you’d go about it off line. I call it the segmented approach.

Let’s say that you have a day job where you make specialty marketing products, you have a networking marketing business on the side where you sell herbal health products, and your hobbies include bicycling and gardening. Obviously, these are very different interests and many of the people currently in your networks within those three areas won’t have any interest whatsoever in your other interests. That is, your marketing customers won’t all enjoy bicycling or gardening, nor will they all be interested in your herbal health line of products. Why waste their time trying to talk about things in which they have no interest.

When you go to your motivation meeting for your herbal health products, you don’t stand around talking about biking up your favorite mountain range, do you? That is, unless you meet another bicycling enthusiast there. And you don’t stand around discussing gardening with your marketing specialty customers who have no interest in gardening. So why would you do that online?

I’ve decided that, in order to manage all of my interests better, to focus my networking efforts at each social media site that I use on specific goals related to my areas of interest. And that’s why I’ve been deleting Facebook friends. I’m about to completely delete my MySpace profile (because I’ve started another one that is specifically geared toward one of my interests).

I virtually have two interests that I manage online. Naturally, Internet marketing is one of those. The other is poetry. For those of you who don’t know, I write poetry and have done so for 20 years. I’ve decided to use Facebook and MySpace completely to network with other poets and people interested in literary topics. I’m using both of those networks to market my poetry and connect with others with that interest. If I decide to start networking with others interested in Internet marketing through either of those sites, I’ll set up another profile geared specifically toward Internet marketing.

But I think I can network with other Internet marketers in other ways. Sphinn, for instance, is a great networking site for Internet marketers. So are a few other places that I like to hang out. But because of the content nature of Blog Content Provider, we are a service provider to a variety of types of businesses, some of which may not be Internet marketing specialists, I have other ways of connecting with potential prospects.

There are a ton of social media sites that are useful. The trick to using them most effectively is to find the ones that can benefit you the most and through which you can meet the type of people you want to meet. I’m a big user of StumbleUpon and I’ve figured out that it’s a great place to show my versatility of interests. I can network with poets and other literary types, Internet marketers, other small business people, and persons interested in politics – all through StumbleUpon. Otherwise, I’m segregating my social networks.

BlogCatalog Makes Viral Marketing Easier

BlogCatalog has announced that it will be introducing a new social marketing tool. They’re calling it the Social Dashboard. The idea is to aggregate users’ social networking and social bookmarking accounts.

I just logged into my account and was hit with the Dashboard face, which is pretty blank right now. But it looks like a good tool. Right away, I see the social aspects of it:

The first thing I see is the big red BlogCatlog box in the upper left corner of my browser. Then, below that is the Dashboard header and a little red Beta next to it. Good clue!

Below the two sentence introduction to the Dashboard there are five tabs labeled News Feed, Discussions, Groups, Broadcasts, and Neighborhoods. Below that are two links: “Try adding some friends” and “updating your subscriptions.”

I haven’t been very active on BlogCatalog, but I may start being more active now. It looks like it could actually be a more effective tool for bloggers than Facebook, which is a bit more social than anything else. At least with BlogCatalog you can choose your friends based on whether or not their blog is in the same industry as yours. Facebook is a little more difficult as you have to select your friends based on a collection of interests or geographical location. Neither of those are really very helpful for business bloggers.

What I like about BlogCatalog is you can consolidate your friends and interests from various social sites like:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• MySpace
• StumbleUpon
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Technorati
• MyBlogLog

Personally, I think the list is incomplete. There are other social sites out there could be rolled into BlogCatalog for greater effectiveness, but I do like that MyBlogLog, Flickr, Technorati, and StumbleUpon are included in the list. I think Facebook is more helpful than MySpace, and YouTube would be a nice addition.

Anyways, it does look like a useful application and I’m looking forward to playing around with it. Gotta go now. I’ve got a lot of BlogCatalog friends to make.

Contrarian Blog Marketing Advice From One Remarkable Blogger

I like Michael Martine. He’s a competitor, but he’s earned my respect.

Recently, Michael posted a video on YouTube in which he tells his audience NOT to use social media to market their blogs. It seems like bad advice on the surface, but I’ll have to agree with him. The nuance that might go missed by some is that social media is a good tool for marketing, but that using it as a tool to harp on your blog is not a good idea. You’ll have to see Michael’s video to catch the full drift, but do pay attention to what he’s saying because it makes a lot of sense:

If I wasn’t having a bad hair day and wasn’t pressed for time this morning, I’d offer a video response. I would like to address one thing about what Michael says in the video, namely, that he got no benefit out of marketing on Facebook. Frankly, I’m not surprised. Facebook is not a good venue for Michael’s services and it likely wouldn’t be for ours either. LinkedIn, however, is a much better social media choice for Michael, and for us at Blog Content Provider.

Like Michael, I get annoyed with the silly vampire bites, what’s your favorite color questions, super duper walls, and other crap on Facebook. I think a part of that has to do with your choice of friends. But even if you choose good friends, you can still get poked by retards. It can be quite annoying.

LinkedIn is set up differently. There’s no poking, no gargoyles, no silly little high school dating questionnaires or virtual college frat parties. It’s a professional organization that caters to traditional professionals who just want to do business with other mature and professional people online. Much more conservative. That’s why I don’t like it.

Why Social Networks Are NOT One-Size-Fits-All Prom Dresses
Now, wait a minute, Allen. You just said LinkedIn would be a good place to network for BCP.

Yes, I did. And it would. If I had the time to actually get in there and rub elbows with people. But I don’t.

I could make the time. It would probably benefit me if I did it right. But I don’t have the inclination – right now. That could change in the future. But right now, LinkedIn is not the social network of choice for me. I am working on other things.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m totally dedicated to BCP. But I also have my own websites. I’ve been writing poetry for over 20 years and I have a poetry website with almost 100 pages and a blog with 150 blog posts. My poetry blog is on page 1 of Yahoo! and moving up in the other search engines. I have pages on my website that are on page 1 of Google, page 1 of Yahoo, and ranking well at MSN and Ask also. I have discovered that I can bookmark a blog post or web page at StumbleUpon and get massive traffic. I can bookmark the same blog post at Digg and get nothing. On the other hand, I can bookmark a BCP blog post at StumbleUpon and get only meager results, even less at Digg, but if I bookmark it at Propeller or a bookmarking site designed specifically for Internet marketers then I’ll get much more traffic.

The reason why I think that happens is because of the personalities of the different social media sites. People on StumbleUpon are a lot more free wheeling and artsy than people on Digg. There is a type of informational blog that will get a lot of votes on Digg if the information is valuable and those pages don’t do real well at StumbleUpon. When we apply this principle to the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, it becomes evident that you have to use the networking tool that is most appropriate for your audience.

Which Social Network Is Right For You?
Poets like to hang out at Facebook. When I browse the Facebook profiles, there are so many groups and applications that appeal to people who write poetry, fiction, and other types of literature. There aren’t so many on LinkedIn.

That doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is a bad place to network. It’s just a bad place to network for people promoting themselves as a poet. On the other hand, if you are trying to hire yourself out as a business writer then LinkedIn is the perfect place to network. Facebook may or may not be based on who your target market is.

Since I only have so many hours a day that I can devote to social networking activities, I’ve decided to spend my time on Facebook instead of LinkedIn. I’m not worried that my blogging business is going to suffer if I don’t network. On the contrary, BCPs blogging business is steadily growing. But if I don’t spend a little bit of time each day promoting my poetry then it won’t get promoted. That’s why I make the point to do a little bit of networking and content creation each day, usually in the evening.

The Right Way To Use Social Networks
Now that you understand where I’m coming from, what’s the best way to use a social networking site? I believe that Michael Martine has hit it on the head. Instead of promoting your blog or your website, which people don’t really care about, promote yourself. People join the social networks to make friends, not to find material that they can read. They have plenty of that. What they don’t have plenty of are friends who take a genuine interest in them and what they have going on in their lives.

When I was an active user at MySpace, I got frustrated at all the comment spam that came across my profile. I, like a lot of other users, would accept any and every friend request without considering whether or not that person would truly be of benefit, or whether I could benefit them. I was going about it all wrong. I ended up abandoning my MySpace profile because of it.

Social networks are not friend collection receptacles. They are places where you can find people interested in the same things that you are interested in. If you do it right, you’ll make friends and those friends will eventually turn into business partners, customers, or other people who can benefit your business (and your business theirs). Do it wrong and you’ll end up frustrated, on the outs, and wondering why no one likes you. I hope this improves your social karma.

Niche Blog Marketing For Products For Sale

There are still a lot of people around who do not believe blogging and social bookmarking can lead to sales for commercial products. Just like those that thought blogging was only a fad back in the 90s, bloggers who think that blogging and social bookmarking have no real benfit for businesses and product sales will learn they are wrong.

Many SEO people are convinced the only way to make money on the web is to rank well in the search engines and that you live and die by search engine traffic alone. Smart SEO people do not rely solely on search engines and try to get traffic from many different sources.

Here is a good example of a niche blog using the blog to sell product. It is well put together and with social bookmarking will likely rank well in the search engines for their products. With social bookmarking added into the mix they are also likely to make sales that do not go through the search engines.

If you would like to get pricing from us on how we can set up a sales blog for you, Click here and submit a pricing request for professional blogging services

Social Marketing Guide

There is a great social networking guide at Search engine Land that you should bookmark and keep handy if you plan to get busy with social marketing, networking, and bookmarking.

The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play

I get so many questions from people about Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and other social news sites every day that I decided to write this little “manual” as something to read before you jump in head first into any social site, and to keep by your side as you progress through the ranks. It should not only help you succeed with your social media marketing efforts, but also help you avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made.

1. Before you even think about signing up with a socially driven news site, consider this: Have you spent some time browsing the community (reading the content and the comments, learning about popular sources and players)? Do you understand how the site works and the niche it serves? If so, is the site for you?

While all socially driven sites have the same basic elements (reading, submitting, voting, and commenting), not all of them function the same way and they definitely don’t serve the same niche (remember, it is not a zero-sum game, and it is with good reason that so many socially driven sites have managed to not only co-exist but also grow at the same time). If you don’t invest time in determining whether a site is right for you from the start, all your subsequent hard work likely won’t pay off and you will have to switch to a different community at a future date.

That first tip is a very important one. If you jump right in with whatever social networking site you found recommended by someone and start bookmarking your blog posts and such, you may find it not working for you and may find yourself banned from the site.

Read the Terms of Service. Learn the rules. Vote on some stories. Comment on some stories. make some friends. Be part of the community. Then start sharing.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) Just What We Needed Another Abreviation

It was once called keyword research. You needed to use keywords in your content and metatags to get the search engines to rank you for those words.

Then it became SEO, Search Engine Optimizaqtion, and included link building and other things as part of the strategy to get more traffic to your website. This was before Google was a portal. Good original content and link popularity were always important before Matt Cutts had a blog and before you could perform searches through Google.

Then along came SEM, Search Engine Marketing. This is the part of your Internet marketing plan that is geared completely toward search engine traffic and includes PPC.

Now with the popularity of social networking, comes SMO, Social Media Optimization. Not like we needed to confuse the average user anymore than we already have.

Social Media Optimization
Most Internet users have heard of Search Engine Marketing (SEO) but the new “buzz word” in the Internet Marketing world is Social Media Optimization (SMO). SMO tactics are used to drive large amounts of people to a web site through new channels. Google and Yahoo, while still major players, are not the only sites that push traffic anymore. The basis of Social Media Optimization lies in creating a community that brings interested users together. Wikipedia describes social media as… “The online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.”

The old version of online marketing and the new have one very important rule in common: content is king. Writing a blog (online web log) that does little more than advertise your services or products will not create a community. Writing a blog that shares your expertise, opinions, latest industry news, and your insights has the potential to bring in interested visitors and gives them a reason to come back. Linking your blog to sites like Digg (digg.com), del.icio.us (del.icio.us.com), and Facebook (facebook.com) will spread your message across the Internet faster than any search engine. This is the Internet’s version of “word of mouth” marketing. People will have the opportunity to read your posts, visit your site and learn more about you and your business.

Those are some great tips, but the writer only includes a small number of the social websites you need to use to do proper SMO. There. I used it. SMO. Getting used to it I guess. He didn’t mention StumbleUpon which brings in a ton of traffic and didn’t mention propeller.com that can help you get great search engine ranklings for your bookmarks. He didn’t mention reddit.com.

Well let’s just say don’t limit yourself to only the three mentioned in the post or the ones I added. Search google for a list of social networking or social bookmarking sites and you’ll find all you need.

CENTER>The Rest of The Blog Post on SMO is here

Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Feel that social bookmarking is an important part of your marketing plan? What percentage of your Internet Marketing Budget is allocated for social bookmarking and social networking then?

This study shows you how marketers acknowledge social bookmarking with their words but not with their dollars.

Social media unworthy of budget?
by Helen Leggatt

Seventy-eight percent of marketing professionals polled in Coremetrics’ annual “Face of the New Marketer” survey saw that social media marketing was a way of getting an edge on their competitors. However, just 7.7 percent of their total online marketing spend was allocated to it compared to 33 percent to online advertising and 28 percent on online promotion design and implementation.

Are you putting enough time and money into your social bookmarking and social networking plan? I think the study is wrong as far as the percentage that is spent on online promotion design and implementation though. I believe if you factor in smaller businesses the percentage that goes into those things is much higher because they have smaller budgets even though design costs stay the same.

Here is more from the actual survey;

58% of respondents have implemented user-generated content or reviews in the past year
31% of respondents have implemented a blog in the past year
25% of respondents have implemented an RSS feed in the past year

For next year,
50% of respondents plan to implement user-generated content or reviews
22% of respondents plan to implement a blog
20% intend to implement social networks, and another 20% plan to implement an RSS feed

If your company is one of those that is planning to implement more social networking, blogging, rss feeds, etc., and you lack the tools or expertise to implement it wisely, email namecritic@blogcontentprovider.com with your phone number and url. We will help you create a plan that fits your budget.

Want Yet Another Social Bookmarking Toolbar?

Is there any room left for your browser to actually see webpages? Are you a social marketing Guru who has a membership at 40 or more social networking or social bookmarking sites? Well there is a new one you can add.

My FB Toolbar: Facebook Toolbar for Internet Explorer
by Adam Ostrow for Mashable.com

Internet Explorer users, your Facebook toolbar has finally arrived. Facebook launched a browser toolbar for Firefox last year, but has not yet made available an official toolbar for IE, which, despite what you might like to believe, still owns the majority of the Web browser market.