It won’t come as a surprise to online marketers who’ve been around for a while, but many of the same principles that worked in “old-fashioned” email marketing (Web 1.0?) apply pretty much directly to successful marketing using newer social media.

As the Web Marketing Ninja says in an article on ProBlogger.net,

You can take exactly the same approach you’ve been refining for your email list-building activity, and apply it to these new channels—the basic principles are exactly the same.

The four core attributes of successful email marketing are:

• Make your email capture findable.
• Provide incentives for people to sign up.
• Craft well-written, engaging messages.
• Give more than you ask from your list.

Translated into techniques for, say, promotion on Facebook these become

• Make your Facebook URL and Facebook pages findable.
• Provide incentives for people to sign up.
• Create content specifically targeted to your Facebook subscribers.
• Offer real value and quality content.

This means you should treat your Facebook channel as a way to connect in a meaningful way with a whole new group of people. These people are not necessarily going to subscribe to your list. You must engage them right within Facebook (and other social media.)

To read more see The Money’s Not In the List, it’s In the Connection

I’ve mentioned guest blogging in a few previous posts, but I admit I haven’t done much of it myself. For years I have focused on article marketing and it is only in the last year or so that the idea of guest blogging has really dawned on me as a really powerful marketing tool.

It is the interactivity of blogs that gives guest blogging so much potential to build followers and subscribers. This is completely different from article marketing (AM). AM is primarily for link building. And as social networking gradually replaces search engine marketing as the most important way to drive traffic to websites and blogs, many of the old techniques such as link building using article marketing are beginning to look flat and uni-dimensional. Getting links is great, but wouldn’t it be so much better if you also got readers, commenters, followers and subscribers?

This comparison between article marketing and guest blogging is what Ann Smarty looks at in the article “Guest Blogging Versus Article Marketing: What Really Works?” (see link below). As she says,

Do blogs have more people who are likely to follow and promote your brand in the future?

Yes, absolutely. Let’s face it: blogs and article directories do have different types of audience. People follow blogs while they only randomly check article directories (if they do that at all). Blog readers are much more likely to “stick” to you and help to grow your brand by spreading the word, linking, coming back regularly, etc.

This disctinction (between AM and guest blogging) is actually true of blogging itself, not just guest blogging. But the fact is, if you have a poorly trafficked blog you can reach so many more people by publishing in a major blog within your niche than by simply posting on your own blog. In other words, guest blogging is a way of reaching out and promoting your own blogs by building and enhancing your own online profile.

To read more about the comparison between guest blogging and article marketing see Ann Smarty’s article here:Guest Blogging Versus Article Marketing: What Really Works?

Do you use Hootsuite? It is a social media dashboard that lets you manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts in one place. There are other services and programs out there that will do this – such as Tweetdeck – so why use Hootsuite?

In a recent post blogger Joe Hackman offers reasons why he has opted for the paid “Pro” version of Hootsuite:

…so why do I love Hootsuite?:

1. The platforms it supports (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm etc)
2. The custom dashboards (must have, seriously!)
3. Ability to access customers accounts and collaborate.
4. Scheduling.
5. RSS/Atom feed support. (This is a absolute must for some of my clients accounts)

These features are available with the free version. The Pro version gives you expanded capabilities such as inclusion of unlimited social network accounts, unlimited stats history (rather than just 30 days, and integration of Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.

More information about Hootsuite:

Determining the business value of HootSuite Pro
Hootsuite Gets a Facelift

You’ve probably heard this advice before: “Research how your competitors use social media to see what works and what gets attention.” It may sound obvious, and I suspect very few of us do it a thorough way. But this is a valuable resource that can take the place of a lot of trial and error.

For example, in an article published at SearchEngineJournal.com Taylor Pratt suggests you ask yourself questions like this:

• How frequently are they participating?
• What types of messages are they leaving: fun, educational or are they just sending out mini-commercials?
• How many people are interacting with them?
• What is the sentiment of those interactions and which ones received the most comments?
• What time of day and on what days are they participating?
• Are they running any types of targeted promotions?
• Which promos are getting them the most attention?

In other words, before jumping into an expensive social media campaign, do some careful planning. But on top of that, do some research into how other companies similar to yours are using different media. You’ll save a lot of time and resources letting them do your testing for you.

Resources:

The Power of Listening in Social Media

This article by Zeke Camusio at SearchEngineJournal.com offers 12 ways you can use Twitter to grow your business. These include:

• Monitor your company name and brand
• Grow your network
• Find followers
• Re-tweet
• Tweet often but not too often
• Introduce contests, events and specials
• Share other people’s content (like I’m doing here)
• Help others

Tips are always a good thing, especially for using something as open-ended as Twitter.

Resources:

12 Tips for Using Twitter to Grow Your Business

Matt Cutts recently suggested that SEOs “try to predict where Google is going in the future” rather than trying to “chase the algorithm”. Here are some Google predictions according to Peter Da Vanzo of SEOBook.com:

• Google will continue to dominate. Facebook is important, but not as a search engine.
• Blackhat sites will not bother Google unless they bother Google users.
• Google will continue to add services that maintain Google’s own position of prominence. This will probably mean the big boys with money will dominate even more than they do now.
• Go where your users are. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp. But Google clearly thinks Google is #1.
• Local is big and will get bigger. Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Local, Google Street View. Local on mobile. This is where a lot of the action will be over the next few years.
• SEO may change, but not that much, and not that quickly.

More on this topic:

SEOs Should Focus On Where Google Is Heading

Key Take Aways from Google’s Matt Cutts Talk at PubCon

Top 9 SEO Tips from Matt Cutts

According to a recent study only about 36% of the CEOs of the world’s 50 largest companies “engage” using social media or company websites. Of those quite a few just do “one-way” communication – posting stuff but not actually interacting with readers/customers/clients. Very few have a profile on Twitter (8%), Facebook (4%), MySpace (4%), or Linkedin (4%).

Five CEOs who “get” social media are featured in a recent Mashable article. For some insight into how they are using social media see the Mahsable CEO article

Mashable.com’s 3 biggest social media stories for today:

- Facebook and Myspace to make joint announcement – an unprecedented event

- Chinese activist Cheng Jianping sentenced to a year of “re-education” for tweeting

- Twitter’s official analytics product has arrived

See original story.

Here are some “Golden Rules” for creating tweets that you want to get retweeted. Having your tweets “retweeted” by your followers is a great way to get more exposure for your message.

If you’re a blogger or blogger wannabe there’s a informative post by Ann Smarty about guest blogging at SearchEngineJournal.com that you should take a look at.

Guest blogging is a win-win situation. It provides already established bloggers with new, original (presumably well written) content. And it gives the guest blogger a platform to reach a lot of people he or she otherwise would probably not reach.

In another blog post from July 2010 Jeremy Bencken offers some suggestions for developing an effective guest blogging strategy. He suggests you should ask yourself three questions when getting involved in guest blogging:

1. What audience do you want to reach?
2. What’s your goal?
3. Is your content truly great?

The most important point is that guest blogging should be aimed not at building links but at building your profile and establishing your own blog as an authority. That means, first and foremost, writing good content that your target market will be interested in. Then find the blogs that help you target those people most effectively.

guest blogging, writing, link building, branding, blogs, blog strategy