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It’s been a hectic week and with Halloween on a Monday, it’s easy to say this week will be crazy. But as the entire office was anxious to leave for Halloween, I started noticing that everybody updated their own profiles, completely ignoring our fan page or any other “corporate” profile.
Keeping the fan page updated, they say, it’s the job of the social media department. There are excellent reasons for it:
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Okay, guerilleros, you know it – the revolucion has taken over your cell phone. The final drop came today, when a magazine publisher, located at the edge of our continent, 3 hours away from any metro area, launched an app that is far more efficient (for its purpose) than any Google app. We havent talked about mobile on the site yet – we focus more on social media marketing on the web. Consider our virginity lost after you read this.
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Yes, this post will talk about social media on a bigger level than we often do. We’ve mentioned examples and strategies to make social media marketing work for sandwiches, indie films, and we talked about some huge social media fails. All in all, these companies dealt with customers directly.
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Good morning Guerilleros! It’s another beautiful day on the Outer Banks, and life is good. But my neighborhood still has garbage lining the roads from Irene. While you may think the county is just a little slow in clean up, it isn’t their fault. When Hurricane Irene swept up the coast, it hit the Outer Banks first. My entire neighborhood was flooded. It was a pretty intense situation at the end, but we got through it. And Facebook was a big help. All of the images were taken from my or friends Facebook pages.
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Opa, Guerilleros!
On my last post I talked about how to extend the life of your social media links with SEO, and one of the tips I shared was to have an attractive and easy-to-use Social Sharing plugin. Today, we’ll go over my two favorite social sharing plugins for WordPress. As you know, we’re huge fans of WordPress for SEO because of the extensive plugin availability and its flexibility.
AddThis is available free, for any website, not just WordPress. Their API allows social media integration with pretty much any community, and they have a list of 338 services (and growing). If you’re a developer, it’s a paradise. For us WordPress users, they have their own WP plugin. You need to have an account with them to enable the full set of features for the plugin, but it’s super easy to customize the look and feel of the buttons, it’s placement on the page (above, below, or both), and which services you want to show your users.
Their coolest feature, however, is the free analytics dashboard they provide. It tracks every time somebody uses the plugin, in the form of “shares”, and then it tracks how many clicks that shared link received, so you know what was your site’s ‘VIRAL LIFT’.
To give you a better example, let’s say a user clicks the “tweet” button and another clicks the “like” button – you now have 2 shares. Once the link goes to Twitter, it receives 3 clicks. The Facebook link receives 5. You now have 8 clicks out of those 2 share actions. Finally, AddThis calculates your Viral Lift, giving you a percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks.
So, AddThis is awesome. It’s my favorite Social Media plugin thus far. I recommend it to anybody, specially if you have a bit more experience with code.
Another plugin I’m proud to recommend is the Tweet, Like, Share, and Plus One. Despite its name, they offer 5 main buttons -Twitter, FB Like, Google +1, Linkedin and FB Share. On their homepage, they state, rightfully so, that 99% of social sharing is done with these services, so why bother with the other 1%?
TLSP1 also has a great support page and a few other neat plugins – I’ve used the scrolling version of their plugin in one of our sites, and it works very well.
Between AddThis and TLSP1, you have everything you could possibly want from a social sharing plugin. Give them both a try, and let us know how they fare in your Guerilla. Leave a comment here with your findings. And if you have a favorite plugin, we want to know about it. Is it better? Why?
Oi, Guerilleros!
I’m currently in Brazil in a sort of vacation, trying to enjoy life without a smart phone (damn you, Verizon’s outdated CDMA network!!), and when I finally get to skim over my Google Reader, I was surprised to see a post by the great Pamela Vaughan talking about the Shelf Life of Social Media Links.
Pamela based her article on Bit.ly’s original research on how long will people pay attention to links shared through different social media outlets. Shelf life, in this case, is how long a link is considered active after it’s original appearance. Bit.ly is perfectly suited for this, since they track every URL shortened using their amazing API for almost forever.
The research showed an average engagement time of about 3 hours for links shared on Facebook, Twitter, and Email. Links on Youtube had a longer shelf life, of about 7 hours. Here’s the breakdown:
Here’s Bit.ly’s densityXtime graphic:
Here’s an awesome answer: IT DEPENDS.
Bit.ly’s research calculated the Shelf Life of a link about a “baby otter being befriended by orphaned baby kittens“, which was about 70 minutes long. However, when they tracked the half-life of a link for “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia” its half life was only 5 minutes.
So, when you share stuff about kittens and baby otters, people seem to pay attention longer than when you share about natural disasters. Go figure.
But the real reason it depends is because even though Social Media can drive a gigantic amount of traffic (RTs, Shares, G+s, etc…), it’s certainly NOT your main source NEITHER will it determine the end of your content’s life.
Let’s say you write about something a little less entertaining than baby otters and orphaned kittens, and a little more long-lasting than an earthquake. You may get a half life of about 30 minutes.
Let’s say in 30 minutes you receive about 100 visits. Engaging these visitors as quickly as possible can guarantee they’ll come back AND make sure THEY HELP YOU RANK. Here are some ideas:
Let’s say out of those 100 visits, you get 3 newsletter subscribers, 4 likes, 3 tweets, and 2 G+.
Your new subscribers will receive content straight in their inbox, and the social “clicking” will help push your half-life a bit longer. But, it will also boost your rankings.
I will write more in depth about this, but search engines are now seeing tweets, likes, and G+s (so weird to write this!) as personal recommendations. So, if somebody you follow tweets about a page related to your search, that page may show up higher in your results.
And as you know, as long as your site is up and your content is relevant, you’ll continue to receive traffic. Way longer than 3.2 hours.
So, the more social activity you get, the broader your content will reach. I promise I will write a more detailed post about this. Do you promise you’ll read it and then click on the social buttons? wink wink
Let me know if you think this research seems accurate to you. I feel sometimes that I see the same link being RTd over and over, for much longer than just 3 hours. Do you? Leave a comment 😉
Is there a guerillero(a) that DOESNT love #Twitter?
There isnt much of a social media guerilla without Twitter and its 200 million users. But even the most beloved (or former most beloved tool, I should say) has its issues, mainly, profitability. Quite the issue that is, being it so that Twitter just received $800 million during its latest round of funding – those investors want their money back.
Not quite so obviously, Twitter took well over 2 years to finally announce their new Promoted Tweets platform, which will place ads from a few select companies and non-profits at the top of your stream. These promoted tweets will only appear if you follow one of those entities, and can be easily dismissed with a click. Very similar to the small adwords placements on Youtube.
Several publications rushed to proclaim the apocalypse – Can Ad-Littered Twitter Keep Its Cool? best sums what everybody is thinking: Will we, Twitter users, stick around as Promoted Tweets go mainstream? Their main point is the now-famous line from The Social Network:
“You don’t want to ruin [Facebook] with ads, because ads aren’t cool” –Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) to a young Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in The Social Network.
More realistically, Forrester Research marketing analyst Sean Corcoran reminded us that Promoted Tweets have been around for a while, but limited to twitter.com and search results within a few 3rd party twitter apps. Corcoran spoke with Adam Bain, president of Global Revenue at Twitter, and Bain guaranteed that “user experience is the No. 1 priority” … BLAH BLAH BLAH…
Fellow Guerillero Mitch Joel was quick to raise the point that Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey have been debating all this time: Is Advertising The Future Of Twitter? Mitch raises a really good question – are we limited to advertisement to create revenue? Does Twitter really have only this most-obvious path to create revenue or is there some more creative, less intrusive method of making money?
One of the coolest ideas – at least the one with the coolest name – revolves around Deep Data Mining – accessing (or granting access to) endless amounts of user data to … target better ads? Anyway, the name of the idea sounds cool.
But quite honestly, ADS ARE A NECESSARY EVIL. Okay, as a marketer, I’m clearly biased, but the truth is users are very much aware that Twitter (or any service) cant be awesome AND free at the same time. See Pandora, Spotify, or any other “FREEMIUM” service out there. Did you ever hear anybody say “I’m quitting Facebook because it has ads” ?
Imagine you run a cupcake shop and you’re able to show an ad to users 20 miles around your store that used the keywords “birthday” or “party” or even “cupcake” within their tweets? Your ad is shown in that user’s stream moments after they tweet, from your own twitter account, and it’d look exactly like one of your regular tweets. Both highly targeted and extremely timely.
No “Stickyness” – no need to keep the ad floating on their timeline permanently. No annoyance, just a very well-timed display placement. Having an option to repeat such tweet every hour or so (as long as not more frequent than hourly) would guarantee a real impression.
If Facebook did make $1.86 Billion, as mentioned in Fast Company’s article, I bet at least 50% came from small businesses spending a few $1000s within their Facebook Ads. Small businesses are the driving force within Adwords, and it made Groupon a multi-billion dollar company. I love using Twitter for local Social Media campaigns, and having a tool like that would benefit a huge amount of businesses.
Am I totally wrong? How bad would Twitter (or any other social network) have to fill its stream with ads for you to stop using it? If that happens, do you plan on switching to Google+? Let us know in the comments.
Guerilleros, this is a quick post based on a flash of inspiration sparked by fellow Google+er PlusCrunch Jay. Jay had JUST posted about his recent 170-second guide to Google+, which is itself a response to gazillion other guides to G+ out there.
As a great content skimmer that I am after midnight (actually, all the time), I told him his guide was still too long. And then I gave him my 3-second guide:
Put family in the family circle. NEVER share you lolcatz or +Robert Scoble ‘s discussions with them. Put friends in the friends circle. Put co-workers in their own circle. Follow the same advice for every social circle you can think of, and then forget where you put JOE and share all of your content in PUBLIC mode
Yeah, I’ve just posted about small businesses using Google+ , and of course, there’s a lot more to it than my 3-second guide shows. Clearly.
Jay’s guide is a great start to get your G+ Geek Mode on. Make sure you read it, comment on it, and then add him to your circles on G+.
Not on G+ yet? Leave me a comment below (use a real email!) and I will send you an invite. If you’re on G+, find me there.
Welcome to the Social Media Guerilla! Here we publish results of social experiments with clients, tips to increase the success of your content marketing campaigns, and a few random thoughts.
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