How to be found more often? Building your online audience
Like the shampoo ad, ‘it won’t happen overnight, but it WILL happen…’ Building up your online reach doesn’t happen in 24 hours, there is an investment of time, energy, patience and strategy involved.
Some week’s growth will be slower than others, some sites and announcements will be more popular and drive traffic and bookings than others.
Expect results and trends in 2-3 months rather than astonishing growth within the first month… be realistic about growing your social media visibility and fitting into online communities as a new brand and marketing entrant.
As you will hear all over the web, you need to ‘join the community’ and become an interactive regular participant over weeks and months.
- It can take between 15 minutes and approximately up to an hour daily to maintain a successful social media program.
- If different staff take responsibility for a separate component of your online strategy, then the workload is shared across less than 15-30 minutes daily for anyone; and no-one is deluged.
- Everyone also gets to enjoy a slice of ownership of the overall online marketing project and see their efforts turn into wins – and hopefully sales and new clients.
Some days will only involve quick updates or posts, or checks for messages, on others staff will be adding new material to profiles, posting up pictures or videos; or setting up a coordinated campaign across all of your social media sites.
Let people know how to find you online:
- Add your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook badges to your site’s home page. You’ll find them either through your social profile’s account dashboards, or often on the bottom menu bar – Twitter calls them ‘Goodies’ and offers widgets, tweet buttons and badge options, Facebook has both widgets and buttons
- Add your social media links to your Contact Us and home pages, email signature, and wherever appropriate on marketing materials and all of your online ‘touch points’
- Start to think about all appropriate onsite and offsite ways to promote and integrate your social media profiles and activity, eg. the back of your next new business card runs, onsite information; and any promotional information, on brochure materials or flyers etc.
- Share tools – www.Sharethis.com – one of the leading ‘share’ buttons. Install on your site and blog so visitors can quickly and immediately share what they find with others online
- Streamline and scheduling – www.SocialOoomph.com – one of many ‘share’ services and tools to automate and streamline all of your social media and online activity, but a very good one. A suite of services to browse, at varying buy-in and price points
More on paid audience-building tools in another post – on the pros and cons and what’s out there at reasonable rates to help you boost audiences over and above your organic efforts.
Much Twittering About the ‘New Twitter’
With headlines like ‘The Facebookification of Twitter’ – read on at http://bit.ly/apRsNW – and ‘The New Twitter Is an Attack on All Desktop Apps’ – http://bit.ly/dnoNy1 – the online social media blogs and publications are in their element, analysing and setting out their initial reactions to Twitter’s first HQ news conference.
But wait, there’s more…Twitter Redesign Moving To A Consumption Platform – http://bit.ly/crYCgU
They’re right too, this certainly does serve it up to the main players in the Twitter desktop apps. market, taking back onsite much of the functionality that previously we’ve had to go offsite to leverage.
Given the number of apps that many of us are working with and the features we’re dipping into across multiple desktop and mobile apps, any degree of simplification is going to be welcomed.
One-stop efficiencies will convert many online marketers and their clients who are time poor and struggling to streamline their online marketing at the best of times. Except perhaps by the likes of HootSuite, Tweetdeck and Seesmic who’ve built up their business platforms on their third-party services and will now be working smart and fast to develop new suites of services and revenue streams. The roll-out is very much still in process as of early October, so they’ll be doing their behind-the-scenes homework before it hits for the masses.
But given that the vast majority of individuals and organisations are just now piling onto social media in mid-late 2010 – and that many of them will never even know there was an ‘old Twitter’ before their time – the new format and its sidebar ‘site within a site’ options will soon be mainstream for most of us.
