ARTICLES

In today’s blog we will look at five handy and easy to use tools which can give a boost to your social networking and online marketing. I’ll try for a reasonably even split between the big players of Facebook and Twitter and I will count down from 5 to 1 in order of ascending coolness.

5. Put your feet up and let TwitterFeed do the work
This is a very well known app but it is so handy I just can’t leave it out of the list. If you have a blog or a website that you update frequently you know how laborious the job can sometimes seem. Time is precious. Once you have published your blog post or web page the last thing you want to do is copy and paste a summary of it into the ever growing number of social media outlets. BUT, you can’t afford not to take advantage of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn either.

Enter TwitterFeed. Sign up to their service, paste in your RSS feed, and sync it up with your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Bob’s your uncle. From now on each time you post a blog a snippet of it will appear on your synched social networking pages, each with a link back to the original web page.

All that TwitterFeed is lacking is support for Google+ but I can’t imagine that it will take long for this feature to pop up.

4. Syndicate your podcast to Facebook
This one is a bit niche but for podcasters it is potentially game changing. Use the Facebook RSS Graffiti app to syndicate your podcast right in to your Facebook feed and on to fan pages and groups as well. As with TwitterFeed, the service will automatically post a summary of the podcast to Facebook but RSS Graffiti can also add a little audio player which plays the mp3 right there in Facebook, i.e. where people want to be!For most people, leaving Facebook and going to an external site is a turn off and they simply don’t do it. So having your media assets playable right there can gain you a good deal more listeners than you would otherwise have if you just gave them a plain old link to your site. You can use RSS Graffiti for podcast -> Facebook but use TwitterFeed for everything else because it is cross-site.

3. Get seen with Twitter Dose
So you finally relented and created a Twitter account. You’ve gone through that awkward “what’s this all about?” phase and now you’re warming up to the idea. The trouble is that you are shouting into the void. You have no followers! Following like minded people will encourage people to follow you in return but this takes time. Luckily there is a way to take this good old I-follow-you-and-you-follow-me idea and take it up a notch – Twitter Dose.

For $25 these guys can get you 1,000 followers in a matter of hours. I must admit that I was skeptical about this but it really worked for my Kooba Radio Twitter (www.twitter.com/koobaradio). In fact, the thing seemed to take on a life of its own and generated 3,000 followers in 3 days. In the end I got scared and changed my password to prevent my account overtaking the likes of Rio Ferdinand and Stephen Fry.

Ok so most of the 4,000 users are probably not interested in what I am tweeting about, but a large number next to your profile looks better than ‘1’, or ‘2’ or ‘12’ or even ‘200’. The down side is that you lose a little of the personal feel that Twitter has.

Also, because you will be following thousands of people as well as having them follow you, your feed gets a little clogged up to say the least. For this reason I advise causation in using TwitterDose. This one is probably worth using only if you want to increase your exposure and beef up your SEO social signals at the expense of Twitter’s usability and 1 to 1 communication potential.

Oh and you might want to untick the option to receive an automated email each time someone new follows you… otherwise your mail box will fill up pretty quick.

2. Keep track of all your social media activity in one place
As Nick is fond of saying – “You can’t market what you can’t measure” and that is certainly true of social networking. With an ever increasing number posts to respond to and metrics to keep track of, social networking can quickly become a full time job. Sync Sprout Social with your Twitter and Facebook to keep and eye on all that good stuff in one place. It tracks things like…

- Average number of daily users

- Running tallies of followers, likes, comments, retweets etc

- Conversion rates and click tallies

- Fan demographics (gender, age, country)

… and a few other bits and bobs, all of which can be exported to a pretty pdf.

What I find very useful is that it keeps all of your incoming and outgoing messages stored for you. This is handy, especially as your outgoing Facebook posts can get lost in the ether after some time has passed. Seeing them all there in one place helps you to manage your efforts, especially if you are splitting the work between several people.

1. Gain potentially huge exposure for your blog by enabling facebook comments
It has its detractors but for simple blog sites you can’t deny that WordPress is pretty damn good. The plug-ins can make life very easy for non-coders. One of the best plug-ins that I have seen lately is Facebook Comments for WordPress. Once installed your blog posts will suddenly have a very familiar looking facebook comment box at the foot of the page .

When you are logged in to Facebook, and let’s face it we almost always are, you can post a comment directly on the blog post using your Facebook account. In other words you can post a comment as a Facebook user on a non-Facebook web page.

Sounds cool but what are the benefits for bloggers? Well, apart from making it more enticing for the user to comment (no extra login or captcha) the comment will also appear in the commenting user’s Facebook feed for all their friends to see – complete with a link to the article. Hence the extra exposure to hundreds of people.

And before you ask, yes you can moderate all the comments before they appear so it is perfectly safe. This one really is a no-brainer. WordPress site owners should install it today!

If you’d like assistance with all things social media, feel free to give me a call on +44(0)20 7403 1444.

Alex