Showing posts with label Social. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social. Show all posts
Last year, Bing introduced its social sidebar. It included content from your friends on Facebook in a sidebar that augmented but didn't get in the way of search results.
Since then, there have been numerous updates from Bing expanding the sidebar to include content from other social networks, like Klout and Quora.
In the wake Facebook unveiling Graph Search, Bing is now announcing the addition of more Facebook data into it's social sidebar results.
Proclaiming there's "someone who can help" with everything you want to do on Bing, Bing has added status updates, links, comments, and images of relevant content that your Facebook friends have shared. Calling it "five times more" friend contnent, Bing wants you to be able to make better decisions on what you're looking for.
Combining search results with friend recommendations provides the framework for friend recommendations in search results without peppering the actual search results with social content. As before, all social content is kept to the sidebar.
By clicking social content, you'll be linked to the original share, or – as is the case with images – you'll receive a full-screen view of the image with the ability to like or comment.
In addition to five times the Facebook content, Bing's announcement indicates that the social sidebar will include results from Twitter, FourSquare, Quora, Klout and even Google+. If you don't see the content you're looking for, click the "+ see all" icon at the bottom of the social sidebar and more will appear.
If you haven't used the social sidebar yet, look for the Connect to Facebook icon in the top-right corner and login. Have you used it yet? Is more social better, worse or doesn't it matter? Let us know in the comments.
LinkedIn now has 200 million registered users. Of those, no one except LinkedIn knows who is truly active. But as a heavy LinkedIn community user myself, I can say with certainty that a good 65 percent are active and of those that aren’t yet, they will be in 2013.
So what is the impact of this milestone for LinkedIn users?
As any social media marketer knows, growth in a social network invariably means more frequent functional enhancements, more opportunities for possible valuable connections, and more ways users can be marketed to by corporations.
Because LinkedIn serves business professionals – including business owners, job-seekers, recruiters, corporate executives, and sales professionals alike – the growth in its members delivers a unique set of challenges and opportunities.
LinkedIn for Recruiters
A well-known place for recruitment, the increase in registered members means more possible candidates and correlated job postings on LinkedIn.
With this type of growth, job-seekers will need to super-size their profiles with strong experience delivery, constant illustration of their knowledge in intended industries, and valuable connections. These candidates will need to follow company profiles regularly and stay up to date with job postings and company moves.
Recruiters will need to invest more time and effort than ever in delivering a professional, strong, and engaging presence on LinkedIn. For headhunters, this means ensuring well designed and developed company profiles and employee pages.
Executives supporting these staffing companies will require strong personal brand delivery on LinkedIn. Sales employees of the same must have visible profiles and daily job updates to engage and attract employer clientele.
LinkedIn for Sales Professionals & Entrepreneurs
The new LinkedIn member count equals, of course, more business people to network with, but, conversely more people to compete with as well. This means that this type of LinkedIn user will need to spend time and effort to ensure an “All-Star” profile which is current, engaging, and illustrative of achievements.
Because of the transparency of user profiles, all recommendations and endorsements (although not as credible) will need to come from quality sources. LinkedIn search engine visibility is now crucial for a user's profile, so the profile must be developed in such a way to support an individual’s business and brand-driving keywords.
LinkedIn for Businesses Professionals
Proactive, daily engagement is now a must for any business professional serious about using LinkedIn as a sales and marketing tool. Engaging with connections, growing a valuable network, answering questions that deliver credibility, sharing and commenting on valuable news stories and relevant groups participation are all now crucial activities for salespeople in an effort to become known in the LinkedIn ecosystem.
Also, let’s not forget about leveraging LinkedIn for creating and sustaining business relationships in the real world. Sales professionals at all levels will need to take the LinkedIn conversation to targeted e-mail communications, coffee meetings, and local networking events to have any chance at “closing the deal.”
Linkedin for Pure Marketing Professionals,
These folks make up a large share of LinkedIn professionals. They will need to step up their personal profile as well, like the sales pros, but take it a step further and possibly engage in targeted advertising.
A marketing professional can truly make a dent by making an alignment with marketing groups within the LinkedIn Group universe. Because marketing and branding professionals are seen as more of thought-leaders, these business professionals will need to spend good time finding and answering questions that work within their knowledge-base and update their statuses with Twitter and blog post links to original content that serves their target.
LinkedIn for All Users
Beyond what the individual LinkedIn user types need to be aware of and take action as prescribed above, all members need to be mindful of the functional and design changes happening on LinkedIn. The rapid member growth means that the internal team will need to ramp up to support expansion.
Millions of members are still being migrated to the newly designed user profiles. Of the ones that have been migrated, millions are still awaiting app recovery of multi-media support such as Slideshare and WordPress blog content.
Further, with the newest company profile design, millions of those company pages are still in need of LinkedIn customer support to publish updated graphics.
Finally, member growth has given rise to, as you may expect, more choices of paid subscriptions and varied lead generation and advertising opportunities for the LinkedIn marketer. It is wise for any LinkedIn user to become familiar with the new premium plans and rate structures.
Overall, LinkedIn users will need to utilize LinkedIn customer support, look to other peer users to assistance, and be patient.
Summary
LinkedIn as a B2B social network isn't slowing down any time soon. The 200 million mark may soon become, 300 million, 400 million and so on – and probably quicker than we all think due to factors such as a changing economy, a vast remote workforce, the rise in entrepreneurship, and the opportunities for recruiters and job-seekers alike to use LinkedIn as their only hiring platform.
To make sure you can play and win on LinkedIn follow the advice I have provided in this article and keep your ear to the ground in the LinkedIn universe.
Bing has been providing Web search results within Facebook since October 2008. At the time, it was a very basic implementation Web results that has evolved along the way.
Lost in the mystery buildup and the privacy/creepy/cool conversations that followed yesterday's big Facebook Graph Search announcement was the ongoing partnership Facebook has with Bing.
In a very Columbo-like moment at the end of the briefing, CEO Mark Zuckerberg exclaimed, "There's one more thing!" Seemingly an afterthought, he quickly added how the new Facebook search product would integrate with Microsoft's Bing search results.
Currently, when you perform a Web Results search on Facebook, you'll see two columns. The first column contains results that are displayed quite similar to a Bing search result with social information from Facebook overlaid with the results. This includes information like how many people have "liked" a result. The second column contains sponsored ads and Related Searches.
In a conversation with a Bing spokesperson, Search Engine Watch has learned Web search will return the same results. However, they are continuing to explore new ways to improve the current search partnership with Facebook.
In a Bing blog post, released near the end of the Facebook press conference, Bing announced the Graph Search project was a combined effort between both Facebook and Bing engineers:
"As part of this product, our two engineering teams worked together to advance a unified search experience. That means that when people want to search beyond Facebook, they see web search results from Bing with social context and additional information such as Facebook pages."
Bing has been getting more social interactions into their social sidebar for the past several years, something expected to continue to grow throughout the foreseeable future. Currently, Bing results provide information from Facebook, Twitter, Klout and Quora.
With Facebook's Instagram purchase last year, one could only surmise that Instagram integration would be coming soon. Zuckerberg dismissed the possibility yesterday stating, "That should be on the list of things that we will hopefully one day get to."
Looking to take advantage of Facebook Graph Search, the social network’s new and improved internal search engine when it fully launches? Facebook has shared a few basic tips on how you can improve the visibility of your Facebook Page when users conduct searches.
In addition to making sure your Page is complete and up to date, optimizing the following areas will help aid discovery of your business via Graph Search, according to a Facebook Studio blog post:
- The name, category, vanity URL, and information you share in the “About” section all help people find your business and should be shared on Facebook.
- If you have a location or a local place Page, update your address to make sure you can appear as a result when someone is searching for a specific location.
- Focus on attracting the right fans to your Page and on giving your fans a reason to interact with your content on an ongoing basis.
The Graph Search algorithm will serve results based on several “features” – things such as connections, Likes, check-ins, and every other piece of data Facebook has collected about your business.
Facebook also provides users with the ability to refine searches with filters including Place type, category, name, Likes, location, and connections who have visited.
Below are some additional posts that will help increase your visibility on Facebook.
Rumors of a Facebook search product have been debated and discussed for a long time. Today, led by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Social Network held a press conference introducing the word to Facebook's new Graph Search. According to Zuck, the product is centered around "making new connections."
Graph Search, not unlike a traditional search engine, is meant to have its users search for data on more than 1 billion Facebook users. However, Facebook wants to leverage all the data they have on all their members to help you find more connections.
It was clearly emphasized from the onset of the announcement that this was not a product that would compete against traditional web search. This is about filtering and sorting through the 240 billion photos and nearly 1 trillion connections of the entire Facebook community.
Graph Search represents the next evolution of Facebook. It started with a News feed that answered the question "What is going on with people around me?" Next, Facebook introduced the Timeline, which helped users find out more information about a particular person (in a creepy, historical way).
Graph Search will allow you to fine new connections and friends like never before. Designed to show answers, not links to answers, Facebook showed two separate search screens. The first was a mock screen of a traditional "10 blue links" search. Then Facebook introduced a still of Graph Search.
A screen shows the familiar Facebook blue bar header, turned into a search box. Results are composed of several panels of friends, resembling Google Now tiles, containing the person's name and basic "About" information. Scores of drop-list controls in a sidebar to the right will act as filters to find just the people you're looking for.
The general idea is that you can search Facebook for people, places or photos as you can currently. However, now you can group your search into a to specific subset, such as "my friends who like fencing," or even "my friends who like fencing and live in San Francisco."
You can also filter for things like TV shows or movies my friends like. This could be convenient for date night with a new crush.
Graph search is also about "exploring new connections." For example, if you meet someone at a party (in real life), but want to find them on Facebook later. Graph Search will allow you, for example, to search for "people named Chris who are friends of Lars and went to Stanford."
Graph Search results for friends are ranked by people you care most about. The rest are sorted by a variety of Facebook signals that includes mutual friends. Photo searches are organized by engagement, likes and comments. Places search can be refined by location, who likes it, who visited or checked in to it, in a move that copies a Foursquare feature.
To eliminate the confusion of how to perform such complicated searches, a set of drop-lists and controls will persistently stay in a sidebar while you're in the search process. This will help you with making refinements to your search.
"We're not indexing the web. We are indexing our map of the graph, which is really big and constantly changing." Zuckerberg said. Regarding privacy, he added: "You want a search tool that can help you get access to things people have shared with you. Graph Search is privacy aware."
By "privacy aware," Facebook suggests the following:
- Every piece of content has its own audience.
- Most content is not public.
- You can only search for content that has been shared with you.
Graph Search is currently in beta, limited to invites. If you'd like to get on the short list, direct yourself to the Facebook Graph Search page and sign up with the "Join Waiting List" link at the bottom of the page.
You can just as easily fail as excel in social media. Setting yourself up for success will make all the difference. That, coupled with realistic expectations, is the pathway to a successful social media campaign.
There are three things a small business needs to think about when venturing into social media for the first time:
- Your personnel.
- Targeting the right audience.
- Your website.
Approach these in the right order for maximum affect. Without the right socially engaged people on your staff, it doesn’t really matter where you plan on "playing" or what your website says. The engagement and return won't be there.
Personnel
We've seen the emergence of social media and community management positions explode since 2011. Prior to that, it seems like social media was an afterthought, much like email marketing (which, like social media marketing, should not be an afterthought, but that's a whole other topic).
These days we're seeing whole salaries, and departments even, dedicated to the outreach on a variety of social networks. If you're a small business, your successes are going to hinge on this person (or these people). Great social media managers are:
- Outgoing.
- Socially adept.
- Smart.
- Passionate.
- Forward thinking
One caveat here: just because someone isn't chatty and outgoing in a face to face setting doesn’t mean they won't be online. I know quite a few people who couldn’t carry on a conversation beyond two sentences at a cocktail reception, but can carry on hour long conversations via Twitter and Facebook. I'm part of that latter category.
The skillsets between online and offline networking can be very different. Writing, and written communication, is very important. Being able to compose a coherent, and often witty sentence, spell, think fast and admit fault are very important qualities in your social media manager.
Yes, admitting fault is important. This is important in any employee, but in someone who is an online customer service representative, being able to say "I'm sorry, that shouldn't have happened." is a huge asset.
Networks
Once you've chosen the right person or people, you need to choose the major networks where you'd like to play. It makes sense to do this now so you know what badges, buttons, and content will perform best based on network and demographic of that network before making a lot of website changes.
You should have some presence on the big five: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. If these networks don’t really fit your niche, then just having a profile and claiming your brand is enough.
Most businesses can create a valuable Facebook network, while Google+ is good in a B2B or software/technical market, and Pinterest is good in a homemaking/food/homegoods/fashion market. Those are generalizations, so don’t take my word for it. Explore each of the big five social networks and see if your competition, or related product/service providers are doing well there. If so, you might also be able to make a place for yourself.
Don’t forget the niche-specific networks. If you're in travel, you should be very active on Tripadvisor Forums. If you're a contractor in a large city or town, AngiesList is an important website for you. Paying attention to niche social networks might be a way for you to be somewhere your competitors are not.
I also really like to advise small businesses to keep track of question-and-answer sites like Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, or Question.com. Also, writing tutorials on how your products work on sites like HowStuffWorks.com can be beneficial. Be sure you check these sites often or set up alerts so you're notified when someone asks a question related to your product or service.
Although your niche will determine which networks are best for you, keep the big ones in mind – and have an active presence if you can. It takes time, and you need to weigh the cost of not being involved with the benefits of being there. Include in your cost-benefit analysis whether your competitors have the capacity to surpass you with online interaction, because that's a huge piece of the puzzle.
You're going to need to decide what common logo to use on these sites, as well as a short but concise brand name representation if you're sporting a long alphabet soup acronym. Once you've found the networks and the persona for your social networks, you can then get your site ready for participation.
Your Website
Adding the icons for your top social networks to your own website is a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many people do it wrong.
If you want people to interact with you, don’t hide your Facebook icon on the bottom of the page. If you want your content shared, make the "Like This" button easily available next to the content you want shared. If you're investing in a person to manage social media, help them out and make the content social media friendly.
Each social network supports a demographic that likes different content. Facebook is what I like to call "memeland." Funny photos, memes, jokes, anecdotes or deals are shared and reshared on Facebook at an alarming rate. Creating content that someone wants to share via Facebook means writing content that is shareable and appeals to that type of user.
Pinterest is all about the images. Don’t expect to have your content pinned if the images are elementary and not appealing or eye catching. Make sure your images have your brand/logo watermarked clearly where they don’t interfere with the point of the article, but are recognizable as your brand.
For Pinterest, I also like to put the name of the website on the image. Here's an example of an image that has been repinned on Pinterest more than 1,000 times from my blog. It's pretty simple, but tells a story.
I took the photo with my phone, and jazzed it up and put some text over it with Pixlr Express, and voila, it went viral. This picture is on the post on my website, and the content is easily pinnable.
It's All About the Attitude
Be realistic in what you're looking for socially. At first, your ROI will be in online word of mouth.
These days, measuring social media ROI and engagement is much easier. There are a lot of posts on setting up custom reports and advanced custom segments for social media tracking.
Be patient. Outreach and engagement is all about time. The post I profiled above was put on my blog in July 2012. It didn’t go viral on Pinterest until five months later.
Facebook is more short term. If nobody likes or shares it in a day or so after posting, try again. How the network is used generally lends to how quickly content goes viral.
Facebook isn’t really used to search for things like "Crockpot freezer meals." Pinterest is used that way thousands of times a day.
Remember:
- Be personable, honest, and involved.
- An involved company is a successful company – as long as you treat everyone fairly, keep things professional and civil, and don't participate in smear campaigns. A company can trash their online reputation in a social network if someone is having a bad day, and just loses it with an irate customer.
- The other side of not losing your temper is not burying your head in the sand. Yes, businesses have problems, everyone makes mistakes – owning what the mistake was and providing a remedy to fix the problem is key to recovering in a positive light.
- Be approachable and involved in your social network of choice.
Don’t be afraid to try. Your small business will have successes and failures in social media. Accept the good with the bad and keep going. Study those who are successful on the social networks and see if you can try their tactics with your products or services.
There are many ways to participate via social media. You'll find one that will work for you.
Facebook will let its billion users send a message directly to its boss, Mark Zuckerberg, but only if you pay $100 for the privilege. Facebook called the Zuckerberg price point an "extreme" test to "see what works to filter spam."
Mashable stumbled upon the cash for reaching Zuckerberg deal, and it said that it got the same response from a range of accounts. None of them were one of Zuckerberg's 16 million followers, and the report suggests that this might be a coincidence.
The idea that the Social Network could charge for access to its users' inboxes have been floating around for a little while now. In December Facebook said that it was updating its messaging tools and running a test that would see a charge put in place to discourage spamming.
"Today we're starting a small experiment to test the usefulness of economic signals to determine relevance. This test will give a small number of people the option to pay to have a message routed to the Inbox rather than the Other folder of a recipient that they are not connected with," it said. "Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful."
Depending on what you want to say, and how many there are of you, this could be a pretty good deal. If you just want to say "Hi", then maybe you should just consider some sort of donation to charity – especially considering there's no guarantee that for $100 Zuckerberg will actually read or respond to your message.
Professional social networking site LinkedIn has announced a new milestone (along with an accompanying infographic, below): more than 200 million members. By far, the United States boasts the most LinkedIn members, and the site is most used by those who work in information technology and services.
Trailing the U.S. and its 74 million LinkedIn members are India with 18 million accounts, the UK and Brazil, each with 11 million users, and Canada with 7 million members. LinkedIn reports it is seeing the fastest growth in Turkey, Colombia, and Indonesia.
After the IT industry, the top industries using LinkedIn are financial services, higher education, computer software, and telecommunications.
As pointed out by Liz Gannes at AllThingsD, the figure LinkedIn is touting is the number ofregistered members, not active monthly users (which LinkedIn won't disclose), so take that figure for what you will. On monthly active user figures among competing social networks, Facebook reports 1.01 billion, Twitter has 200 million, and Google+ claims 135 million.
LinkedIn launched in 2003, reached 50 million users in October 2009, and 100 million members in March 2011.
Gurus. Mavens. Ninjas. Rockstars. No doubt you’ve seen some of these job titles on LinkedIn or Twitter profiles.
B.L. Ochman at Advertising Age even did some calculations using FollowerWonk to show the meteoric growth of such titles over the past few years. We now have roughly 181,000 social media folks calling themselves everything from social media freaks to social media warriors. There are even a few "whores" out there.
But is it time to put such “fluffy” job titles out to pasture?
Patricio Robles at Econsultancy is one who believes that you should avoid job titles like those already mentioned, as well as job titles in which you tout yourself as an evangelist, expert, genius, or wizard, among others. And many seem to agree.
The post spawned some great comments, such as “There's a big difference from showing some personality and being a pompous knob!” and “These job titles are pretty useful, they help identify people not to work with.”
What do you think? Is it OK to call yourself a rockstar, or is it time those who work in search and social media to abandon such self-appointed job titles?
In 2012, not only was a baby girl named Hashtag, but now the word "hashtag" has been awarded the title "word of the year" by the American Dialect Society.
The hashtag, or '#', is a regular feature on Twitter and is making its way into the daily conversations of people who actually say things like "hashtag: awkward" out loud. No wonder then that it is "word of the year".
"This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk," said Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society.
"In the Twittersphere and elsewhere, hashtags have created instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop culture."
If the idea that Hashtag is a great word annoys you, then be happy that the rival word "Yolo" was also in the running and didn't win.
Yolo is "Carpe diem" for people that wear their jeans low and their hats backwards, and stands for "you only live once". The phrase "Gangnam style" was another contender.
The winner last year was "occupy". The society says that winning words must either be demonstrably new or newly popular and widely used. In 2010 the winner was "app" and in 2009 it was "tweet".
Sibling organisation the American Name Society voted "Sandy" as its "name of the year" for 2012.
While the LinkedIn Profile change has impacted the design and user experience, it hasn’t necessarily impacted how you’re found on LinkedIn. For those of you who are new to LinkedIn, the importance of getting found by your target audience on LinkedIn is equally as important as it is to engage that person once they find your profile.
With more than 175 million users (many of whom are executives and decision makers), you would be hard-pressed to get their attention without actively doing something to get found and then engaged.
Here are the steps you need to take to make your profile visible and engaging so that qualified leads start flying into your LinkedIn Messages Box.
1. Define Your Personal Branding Goal
The first and most crucial step to driving qualified leads via LinkedIn marketing is for you to assess, define, and build out your market differentiators and value of you as a personal brand. To do so requires introspection on several levels.
You need to define your goals for being there:
- What are you trying to accomplish by being present and active on LinkedIn?
- Are you truly interested in being a business resource?
- Is your goal to become a thought-leader in your industry and captivate the inquisitive minds of business professionals who use LinkedIn as their main news source?
- Are you simply looking to use the social networking tool to augment and complement your other online marketing efforts in your sales efforts?
Defining your personal branding goal is the first action you need to take. Do it now. Write it out because this will set the tone for your new LinkedIn Profile.
2. Determine Your Personal Branding Keywords
Before you start to create or enhance your LinkedIn profile, you need to then determine, what I call, your personal branding keywords. These are the keyword phrases that brand you. They define:
- What you do.
- Who you do it for.
- Where you deliver your service (location).
- Where you add value.
- In what area you have a focused expertise.
You will want to come up with initially your top 10-20 personal keywords phrases. Then drill down to a solid 2-3 that line up with what you state in your headline, your summary, and what you substantiate throughout your work history and skills.
Primarily, the LinkedIn search engine is looking for these keywords in your title/headline, custom URL, your skills, and your work titles.
3. Highlight Your Experience, Skills and Expertise
At this point, you can then review what your current LinkedIn profile looks like and determine changes in your URL, headline, summary, work experience, and skills.
- Custom URL: Your LinkedIn custom URL is your brand statement.
- Headline: Your Headline reflects what it is you want to be known for (going back to Step 1 and defining your personal branding goals).
- Summary: Your Summary is important. It says hello to your audience in such a way that engages, but doesn't sell and provides direct examples of credentials, awards, experience. This is a great place to provide link addresses of supportive and contact information, such as your website, your blog (if hosted off-site), your e-mail address, reports/articles/whitepapers/books you have published, and links to video content.
- Skills & Expertise: Your Skills are truly areas where you have confirmed experience, and better yet, expertise. Your Skills should match the work experience you deliver throughout the profile, so that skill keywords are found in job titles and descriptions.
4. Develop a Written Target Market Definition and Strategy
Remember that your profile reads top to bottom and is your story of your personal brand – where you excel, how you add value – and addresses your specific target audience. It's important, then, in the exercise of making your LinkedIn profile more engaging, to develop a written target market definition and strategy.
List out what you will provide to said target (products/services/types/way of delivery) and create some real user paths, like we would say in web design user experience. Take it a step further and then relate customer/client needs/pain points to your solutions. The more you deliver a path of credibility in direct relation to your target’s specific needs, the more chance for qualified lead generation success.
Win LinkedIn Engagement
It isn't enough for you to drive visibility in the LinkedIn search engine. What about engaging your target when they aren’t necessarily looking for someone like you, but when they may be active in their Groups or looking for Answers?
These “personal brand impressions” (or so I call them) make all the difference between a cold and warm lead. You must be active in these areas for people to find your profile and find out all about you (and then Message you).
My next Search Engine Watch article later this month will provide an actionable way for you to win in LinkedIn engagement off the Profile. Happy New Year!
January is always a fresh time to fine tune online marketing habits. One good place to start is the social media editorial calendar.
You remember, that file you started last year and haven’t opened since? On the flipside it could be a daily master plan that you did follow that made your analytics go through the success roof. In the latter case, maybe it is a do-over or just a yearly update.
The Power of the Written Word and Social Media
How can the power of the written word impact your social media editorial calendar? Research shows that people who write down goals, share that information with a friend, and send weekly updates to that friend are 33 percent more successful in accomplishing goals than those who merely formulated goals.
If you consider your colleagues, subscribers, prospects, and clients as “friends” – think about the power of a written and organized social media editorial calendar ...
Originally designed for books, magazines, and newspapers, editorial calendars have been around for centuries and are the lifeline to successful publishing. Today’s editorial calendar takes into account web content, company press releases, blogs, social media news network postings in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube as well as email marketing plans and PPC, should also wrap into traditional marketing campaigns.
Editorial calendars bridge together content and themes for social media and beyond:
- Blogs
- Online newsrooms
- Social media network messaging
- Events
- Email campaigns
- Video
- Offers
- Promotions and sweepstakes
- Web pages
- PPC
Social Media Editorial Calendar Benefits
Social media editorial calendars create a cohesive layer to a content strategy that bridges the benefits of:
- Accountability: Put it in writing where everyone can see it, touch it and live it.
- Commitment: Stamp a date on it, chances are, you will get it done.
- Accomplishment: Checking it off the list feels sooooo good and also ties back to accountability.
- Planning: Big picture first, start at the year, month, week and day.
- Creativity: Mapping out the topics first will help free up space for creativity and inspiration.
- Trends: Tie in the topics with keyword research and boost the SEO strategy.
- Measurement: Watching the results in growth and also what is popular in content via tools such as Google Analytics will give you valuable information for future editorial ideas.
Tips For Creating a Social Media Editorial Calendar
- Goals
- Start in baby steps and grow in phases each quarter.
- For example, in the first three months you might map out to produce 40 pieces of content total that is divided into blog posts and social media messages and set a goal for the 2nd quarter to increase by 25 percent. Watch the analytics grow!
- Frequency and Timing
- Break it down month-by-month, then week-by-week to day-by-day and even hour by hour for the uber advanced.
- Themes
- Pick topics or themes for each month into broad categories that can be broken down into sub-categories.
- Holidays, trade shows, seasons, fashion, sports, etc.
- Or dedicate each month to a different product focus or service of your company and design a collage of content ideas centered around that product or service in the form of videos, Tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates.
- Share and Play Nice
- The social media editorial calendar isn’t designed to be a top secret document. The idea is to share and collaborate across the team of writers, editors, researchers and also the other departments such as SEO, advertising, public relations, product teams, and the sales team.
- Take Inventory
- Social media networks continue to evolve and with many changes in the past 12 months. For example Google + and Pinterest have come into play, and adjustments need to be made to accommodate these new messaging strategies.
- Social Mobile Messaging
- The explosion of tablet growth from front-runners such as the Apple iPad bring new items to the social media editorial calendar for mobile users. Think about bringing in creative QR messaging on certain months or create a campaign using augmented reality to illustrate a monthly theme or topic.
- Connect with Print Campaign
- Connect the dots between print and online and carry over print advertising themes and campaigns into the social media calendar and vice-versa
Tools for Editorial Calendars
- Microsoft Excel: This is the trusted standby and go-to solution that can be at least used as a step one in mapping out a strategy.
- Google: Google makes it easy to set up editorial calendars using Google Calendar, Docs, Notes, and more.
- WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin: This gives the publisher a “bird’s eye view” of your content that allows you to control your long-term strategy. Celebrity copy writing stars such as Chris Brogan and Copyblogger give this plugin a thumbs up.
- HootSuite: In essence your social media editorial calendar is your dashboard of content broken down into timelines. HootSuite gives you that same dashboard feel when you break down the content into social networking massages.
- 21 Habit: So you want to get your social media editorial calendar up and running in 21 days or less? Put yourself to the test with this app designed to help you make or break habits, whether it be marketing or other business and personal goals
Reporting on the spot news via social media is one way to get the word out. But having an organized 12-month editorial calendar that slices up the year into monthly, weekly, and daily snapshots can take your content to new levels of success. Make 2012 the year of habits of highly successful social media editorial calendars that deliver quality content.
