Everyone knows that advertising isn’t cheap. This is why social media is becoming a very important advertising channel. When done right, this low-cost “advertising platform” beats out all the other advertising methods hands down in terms of cost and effectiveness. A small or medium business should have six social media elements, according to Heather Lutze in a recent article at Tech Journal South called “Social media advertising strategy: six profiles you must have.”

Called the “Social Media Advertising Formula,” Ms. Lutze says there are six essential platforms that business owners must have to garner the potential of social advertising. Each platform offers you specific ingredients that only it can offer, so you’re not duplicating your social media effort when active on each one while targeting your message to targeted audience. Additionally, each platform allows you to optimize your presence and message best suited to its strongest points, furthering the effectiveness of your presence online. Targeting your audience and optimizing your presence equal best social advertising potentials.

Let’s look at the six.

• LinkedIn. This business profile site ranks well in search engines and is a great platform to keep business associates updated on your business events. To optimize your profile on LinkedIn, select one core keyword and use it frequently, but not without being spammy or sacrifice user experience.
• Facebook. This is a closed community so it does not rank in search engines. It is an effective place for personal profile online, but you can also use your business keywords to optimize your marketing effort. To optimize your profile on Facebook, select one business keyword and aim to become the subject matter expert in this community.
• MySpace. This is an open community, ranks very good in search engines, and allows full profile for businesses. To optimize your profile on MySpace, again use a specific keyword for your business, and take advantage of the search function to create an effective MySpace outreach network.
• YouTube. This is the biggest and most well known video sharing platform, and still is the best for viral marketing campaigns. You can run marketing campaigns for your own business and for your clients as well. To optimize your YouTube campaign, use each video to target specific keyword, and use the same keyword in both the video title and its description.
• Blog. You blog is one of the most important and easiest platforms to get yourself ranked high in organic search engine results. Blogs are also a great tool to build trusted followers as you build your (or your business’) own reputation. To optimize your blog, use specific keyword(s) for each post and use the same keywords in the meta title, meta description, and in the body of the post itself. Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
• Twitter. This is the hottest micro blogging platform currently. Though it has several limitations, Twitter can be an effective tool for business as many can attest. Twitter posts are open so they also rank well in search engines. To optimize your presence on Twitter, brand your profile to reflect your product/service expertise, while using keywords in all your Twitter posts.

Read more on Heather Lutze’s “Social media advertising strategy: six profiles you must have.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising

Related posts

• Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success
• Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark
• Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy
• Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz
• Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team
• How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team
• How to Benefit from Twitter Trending Topics and Keep Your Marketing Integrity and Ethics Too
• Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge
• Marketing and Customer Service Are Really One and the Same to Customers
• Reason Companies Fear Social Media and Blogs: Maybe It’s Communication Itself

Pear Analytics recently did a study on how people are using and consuming Twitter. The study took 2,000 random tweets from the public timeline in English and in the U.S. over a period of 2 weeks, from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and was posted by Ryan Kelly. While I applaud the effort and think they are on the right track on providing a super-value added study to the public and marketers, I wouldn’t call this a conclusive study. Ryan mentioned that they will update it regularly so that’s a good thing.

Here are the results of the study with the categories defined by Pear Analytics:

• Pointless babble 40.55%
• Conversational 37.55%
• Pass along value 8.70%
• Self promotion 5.85%
• Spam 3.75%
• News 3.60%

You can read about the details of the study yourself (link at end of this post.) Some of the most surprising results are the following:

• Self promotion and spam are not as prominent as many have complained about.
• News represents a very small amount of activities, despite recent media buzz.

So it looks like issues that affect many people (like the Iran election and spams) that receive huge news coverage also tend to pump up public impressions about Twitter and exaggerate their real impacts. The real numbers seem to show that these are not much of a problem; you just think they’re big problems because they’re constantly in your face or they annoy you a lot. With more refinement (such as extended time of day included in the study) we may see an increase in these numbers.

I look at this study as work in progress with better updates to be expected. Here are a few issues I see that should be resolved to improve the study value in the future:

• Pointless babble is not necessarily a negative thing as its name may suggest. This category needs more refinements as this big group represents many important pieces of information, both to consumers and marketers. For the consumers and individuals, it is exactly the social aspect of social networking, and people will continue to socialize the way they want to. All you can do accept it and understand it, not control or eliminate it. And this social spaces and activities are exactly where marketers need to be to understand consumer behaviors.
• The time periods of 11:00 am to 5:00 pm CST is too limited to really understand Twitter users in the U.S. It’s only 6 hours of each of the time zones. At a minimum I think the study should begin at 6:00 am to midnight for each time zone. As it is, it merely tracks only the lunch to early evening hours of east coast time (noon to 6:00 pm, entirely missing 12 hours of east coast tweets,) and includes only the mid morning to mid-afternoon hours of west coast time (9:00 am to 3:00 pm, again entirely missing 12 hours of west coast tweets in the morning, late afternoon and evenings.)

See the original Pear Analytics post on “Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

Related posts

• Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising
• Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy
• Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz
• Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team
• Marketing Basics and Building Buzz – What About Integrity?
• How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team
• How to Benefit from Twitter Trending Topics and Keep Your Marketing Integrity and Ethics Too
• Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge
• Marketing and Customer Service Are Really One and the Same to Customers
• Scaling Back or Stepping Up Marketing in a Recession? Maybe It’s the Wrong Question

Trending topics on Twitter is a double-edged sword. It gives users instant snapshots of what the hot topics are on Twitter. At the same time it opens the floodgate for Twitter spams and misinformation. I’m all for pushing the latest and greatest tools for marketing use, but it should be done responsibly.

We all know Twitter is free (at least for now.) And because it is a social tool, interestingly, Twitter itself can potentially be destroyed by how its users use it – mass destruction so to speak. Spams and misinformation will only have negative effects on Twitter, which eventually will hurt the whole community.

So here are some tips on how to use Twitter trending topics to your benefits while maintaining your own integrity and ethics.

• Get involved in hot and active conversations.
• Stay on topic and be relevant.
• Have fun, be yourself, and help others.
• Leave self-promotions at the door (or at the keyboard.)
• Un-follow those who regularly and knowingly start and/or re-tweet spams and falsification.
• And most importantly: Don’t try to benefit from Twitter trending topics.

Share your views with a comment below.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Benefit from Twitter Trending Topics and Keep Your Marketing Integrity and Ethics Too

Related posts

• Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising
• Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark
• Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge
• Online Marketing Success: Don’t Forget the 45-and-Older Demographic
• Buy One, Get One Free Electronic Coupons: Mobile Marketing at Work
• Blogging for SEO Benefits, Plus a Great Side Effect
• For Marketers: This Is Not The Time To Retreat!
• Why Companies Should Not Get Into Social Media.
• About Cuong Huynh

Twitter is a great tool as many would attest. It can do so much with so little and provide the intimacy, simplicity and immediacy that not many other platforms can even come close. While many social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace can expect to continue to command large memberships and usage, Twitter needs to get its act together before its Archilles’ heels bring it down. I’m talking about Twitter spams, and to a less extent, Twitter’s lack of a business/commercial model.

In recent years, it seems that there is a new social network kid in town every year that gets all the attention and leaves everyone else in the dust. This year it’s Twitter. Last year it was Facebook. Before that, MySpace. For Twitter, numerous third party tools and applications have been created to make it even easier to use while providing amazing additional features. But because of the (seemingly) lack of strict quality guidelines of what the users can and can’t do, Twitter spams are becoming prevalent.

Twitter spams are not out of control yet, in my opinion. But it’s reaching a point where it hinders additional explosive growth of the Twitter platform. Sure there are many new users signing up. But I think the vast majority joined out of curiosity and not necessarily needs. And let’s face it, Twitter itself is simple but not very intuitive, so it requires somewhat of a learning curve on the part of new users, and requires them to stick with it to “get” it. Coupling this with high potential for spams will probably keep Twitter to the status of being just another cool, but niche, tool for individuals, and just another tool for business, as opposed to a great tool for the mass and an essential tool for marketers.

But then again maybe we’re trying too hard to make Twitter our own. According to Twitter creator Jack Dorsey as reported on theonion.com, “Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them….” Mr. Dorsey said about how Iranians are using his tool that, “I couldn’t believe they’d ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless.” According to theonion.com, “he is already working on a new website that will be so mind-numbingly useless that Iranians will not even be able to figure out how to operate it.”

So the fact remains that Twitter will do whatever it wants to do. And lacking a clear (publicized) business/commercial plan, we’ll just have to take Twitter for what it is right now and be glad that such tool exists. Only the strong will survive, for both Twitter and its users.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge

Related posts

• Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising
• Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success
• Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark
• Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy
• Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz
• Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team
• Marketing Basics and Building Buzz – What About Integrity?
• How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team
• How to Benefit from Twitter Trending Topics and Keep Your Marketing Integrity and Ethics Too
• Marketing and Customer Service Are Really One and the Same to Customers

Cuong Huynh advises businesses and individuals on marketing communications, social networking, and new media strategies.

Specialties:

Marketing Communications, Brand Identity, Social Media & Viral Marketing, Trade Shows, Press Releases, Public Relations, Marketing Metrics and ROI, Advertising, Marketing Plan, Client/Vendor Management, Creative Services, Art Direction, Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0, Blogs, Web Applications, Graphic Design, Marketing Video, Desktop Publishing

View my presentation: Social Media Marketing: Creating Cost Effective Marketing Channels For Small and Medium Businesses.

If you need to talk to me about your social media marketing strategy, please contact me via the Contact Page.

View my profile on cthmedia.net. And if you haven’t done so,  subscribe to my RSS feed.

Also follow me on Twitter
@CuongHuynh
@LovingPho
@CleanCarTalk
@BlockbusterFilm
@SoccerUSA

Enjoy my other blogs:

• Vietnamese Pho Noodles
• Clean Car Talk
• Airport Hybrid Rentals

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

About Cuong Huynh

Related posts

• Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising
• Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success
• Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark
• Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy
• Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team
• Marketing Basics and Building Buzz – What About Integrity?
• How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team
• How to Benefit from Twitter Trending Topics and Keep Your Marketing Integrity and Ethics Too
• Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge
• Marketing and Customer Service Are Really One and the Same to Customers