Fresh Clicks: Marketing and Analytics Strategies » Social Media Marketing

Automating your Facebook Page

Lary Stucker — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:16:54 +0000

Meeting your customers in the medium THEY are most comfortable with is a cornerstone of good eMarketing. Since Facebook is the largest social website on the internet you will inevitably decide that your products or services need a presence there. You’ll set up a Facebook Page and suddenly have this new medium that needs regular updating with content and monitoring for interactions. You know, the whole “social” part of social marketing. What you need is a way that automates the distribution of your content to facebook pages. So what are you waiting for? Lets get started!

This article assumes that you already have a Facebook account, created a Page (If you haven’t, go create a Facebook page!), and are logged in.

Get the RSS Graffiti Application

At the bottom left corner, click “Applications> Browse More Applications
In the Search box type in, RSS Graffiti and press ENTER. Click on the RSS Graffiti image and it will take you to the RSS Graffiti Facebook Page.
Under the the Image on the left side you will see “add to my Page” a window will pop up and display all of the Pages that you are responsible for. Click on the ones you want to add RSS Graffiti to.
Go back to the bottom left corner, click “Applications> RSS Graffiti. Click on the Page that you want to add RSS Graffiti to (It will have a grey icon next to it)
You should see a status that reads, “Page Status: Not enabled” and a big blue button, “Click here to add RSS Graffiti to this Facebook Page. (If you don’t see the button, try refreshing your page. I had this problem and a refresh helped)
Next you’ll have to grant publishing permission, (again, if you don’t see the option try to refresh the page.) then click on the big blue button, “Click here to rant stream publishing permission.” and the click on the “allow publishing” button.
Now you can click the green, “+ add feed” button so lets add some feeds!

Status updates

An important part of Facebook is the Status Update. The small input form at the top of the page that is supposed to answer the question, “What’s on your mind?” Think of this as the same kind of micro-blog as Twitter or Friend feed and while your thinking of it, wouldn’t it be nice if those feeds would automatically update your facebook status?

Go to your twitter page. (mines http://twitter.com/LaryStucker) scroll down and on the right hand column you will see RSS feeds of LaryStucker’s tweets.click on it and you will get a URL, http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/11821852.rss
Add your twitter feed to the Feed URL and give it a name to easily identify it, you know something catchy like, Twitter Feed.
Under “Handle as” choose “Status updates”
Under “Title” choose, same as item’s title. I figure if you took the time to give the original item a good title, why change it now.
Click, “save”

News and Post Updates

When you have more substantial things to say about your products or services you probably do so on a blog or news portion of your website. (Either of those publications should have an RSS feed, if they don’t, what’s wrong with you? You seriously need to update your site to include RSS feeds.) If their important enough to say to your blog/ news audience than your Facebook fans should want to know about it too!

Go grab the RSS feed from your blog or news site. (I use feed burner to syndicate this blog: Freshclicks.net)
Add it to the Feed URL and give it a name to easily identify it, like “FreshClicks Blog”
Under “Handle as” choose “Generic Feed”
Under “Title” choose, same as item’s title. I figure if you took the time to give the original item a good title, why change it now.
Click, “save”

Thats all there is to it! Now your Facebook Page will start filling up with your content automatically, the only thing you have to do now is monitor the responses. I wonder if there is a way to do that automatically…

Twitter: creating a corporate engagement policy

Lary Stucker — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:09:47 +0000

Plenty has already been said about Twitter and how it has changed social networks. One of the areas that is not talked about enough is the impact consumer engagement can have on your product lines.

I am going to use Adobe Dreamweaver as a case study to demonstrate the various kinds of customer tweets and how Adobe could be positively engaging their Dreamweaver customers on Twitter. I’m picking on Adobe a little bit because I think their current Twitter Dreameaver account isn’t very engaging and could be a valuable resource to the company.

Millions of Twitter users are talking about what they are doing, experiencing or interested in at any moment in time. That practicality guarantees that someone, somewhere is talking about your products or service. You can group these tweets into five categories:

Praise: The best kind of Tweets. Spontaneous endorsements from actual customers.
Problems: Oh oh, someone is having a problem with your product or service and they are complaining in a public space! Quick, turn that negative into a positive by showing your commitment to customer service and a speedy resolution.
Solution: Congratulations, someone has figured out that your products or services are actually helpful at solving some kind of problem. Even better, they are telling others about it.
buzz: Sometimes your product or service just because part of a conversation.
Pirate: Some has just posted a link to a message board or another new “warez” site. Oh great, yet another avenue for pirated software to make it into the hands of your potential customers.

Classifying the types of messages that are likely to be generated by your customer base makes it easier for your marketing team to create workflows and policies for corporate communication. You need to create policies that can engage these users and have a positive influence on the twitterverse.

Praise Tweets

These are the best kind of tweets, and I would typically try to do three things:

Retweet: It shows people on twitter that others are very happy with your products. It will also encourage the original twitter user to say more good things about you in the future.
Follow: Following the person will not only encourage them in their original tweet, it will make them feel like you are more engaged with them. Engaged customers are happier customers and more likely to recommend your products to others.
@ reply: You can also encourage them to try out specific features of the product. This is for their benefit and the benefit of those that follow you.

Problem Tweets

When you start seeing tweets where customers are having problems with your products you have two issues to resolve.

Did they just find a new bug, and if so you need to get your developers on it.
Can you resolve this customers problem?

In a situation like this, I like to publicly engage the customer and ask him to Direct Message (those are messages sent privately between twitter users) for details regarding his problem. If there is an easy solution (like an updated release) make sure you also tell him that publicly. If this is an open, unresolved issue, privately tell him that the dev team is working to resolve it and ask if he would like to be notified when a update is released. It shows this customers that you’re a company that cares about their customers. Even if you can’t immediately resolve their problem, it can turn a frustrated customer into a content, possibly happier evangelist for your products.

Solution Tweets

Of course your software solves a problem, but when a customer says it, it carries a lot more credibility. These are a lot like “Praise tweets” except more substantial so I recommend following the same retweet, follow, and @ reply philosophy.

Buzz Tweets

There typically isn’t much you can do to engage a customer that just casually refers to your product. What you can do however is keep a monthly tally of the number of buzz and positive tweets your products receive as another way to measure brand awareness.

Pirate Tweets

When someone tweets with a link to a pirated copy of your software or information regarding circumventing your copy protection, they are in violation of Twiter Terms of Use. If you report it, the tweet will be removed and the account can be suspended. What ever you do, don’t engage the Twitterer directly. Instead, flag the account and send an email to copyright@twitter.com

Final Thoughts

It is easy to create a Twitter account for your organization or product and start broadcasting content to the world. However, the companies that are really successful on twitter are the ones who actually engage their customers. I want to hear from you. Does your comapny have an engaged twitter policy? What’s stopping you from developing one?

Who can fix Twitter?

Lary Stucker — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:27:16 +0000

…or is Twitter really broken?

I am fairly new to Twitter, but I am not new to marketing. I have been posting regularly, trying to add value and trying to contribute to the community. When people started following me, I was honored. I would carefully examine their Bio, their latest tweets and links to see if they added value. If they did add value I would follow them back. If they were not in my space or a space I was interested in, I wouldn’t follow them. Throught the day I would notice my follower stats would rise and fall. What was going on? Were they not interested in what I had to say or did I say something that was offensive? I have to admit I felt a little self-conscious. Well, it turns out that a lot of people on Twitter will only follow you if you follow them back–they are gaming the system.

Having spent a lot of time in Marketing, I understand how and why it is important to rank high in search result pages. I also understand that the art of “optimizing” for search is about getting away with as much keyword stuffing and link baiting as possible without hurting the user experience or getting penalized by the Search Engines. So, I also understand why people are doing the same thing in Twitter. I read posts by Robert Scoble on the authority ranking controversy, and I agreed with his philosophy, “No I am not going to be a part of this. I will build my network on solid, social marketing principals.” Then I see Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan and others doing, advocating, and practicing the exact opposite strategy. The “follow anyone that follows you” approach will help grow your reach as quickly as possible. Even in the beginning Robert Scoble had the same strategy. Why do you think he follows over 20,000 people? He must believe they add some value or he would stop following them.

My experiment

What I have decided to do:

Follow people who add value to my network.
Contribute to my network – add my own brand of value and comments to the conversation.
adopt the “follow me I’ll follow you” approach.
Use applications like TweetDeck to filter my TweetStream so that I can monitor the users that matter to me (Yes, @Scobleizer you are in that group!)

You can follow me on Twitter here @LaryStucker

Conclusion

So, I guess Twitter isn’t really broken. It is following the same path of all of the other networks that reward popularity. In the end I suppose a company will come along, like Google, and find ways of making meaning out of this system. A true Twitter rank will probably emerge as an algorithm based on followers, Keyword usage, and retweets.

Let me know your thoughts on the state of Twitter, the “follow me and I’ll follow you” philosophy, and the Authority controversy?

MediaOnTwitter: New media wiki service for Twitter

Lary Stucker — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 01:46:29 +0000

I came across a new Wiki service called MediaOnTwitter which is trying to build the “ultimate Twitter resource”. It is meant as a resource that lists media outlets, journalists, and bloggers from around the world.

You would use the service in two ways:

Finding reporters, journalists, and bloggers on Twitter worth following
Contacting them through Twitter to pitch stories and articles.

It will be interesting to see how the site plans on maintaining the integrity and quality of the content on their site, esspecailly with an open wiki interface. Thanks to Guy kawasaki for tipping me off to this site!

Auto-posts your WordPress or Typepad blog on Twitter

Lary Stucker — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 07:53:40 +0000

Why should you post link notices to your Twitter account?

Everybody has different reasons for starting a blog site (personal, corporate, or industry related), but they all have one thing in common – they want to increase their readership. One way to do so is to give your readers different ways to discover your blog and get alerts when you post new articles. Besides the obvious FeedBurner, RSS integrations, you might want to think about creating auto-generated twitter links. Whenever you post a new article to your blog, a new “tweet” will be created and will alert all of your followers. Not only will it alert your current followers, it will set off an entire series of “pings” which will trickle down to different social networks and feed monitoring services so that more and more readers will discover your amazing blog!

Why auto-post?

As with most marketing campaigns, having consistent sustainable processes is a valuable part of creating a successful campaign. Just planing to update your Twitter account every time you post a new article is not enough. No matter how diligent you or your marketing team is, eventually it is going to slip. The key is to automate the process.

How-to sync your Twitter account to a WordPress powered blog

Luckily Alex King has developed a WordPress plugin that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It can automatically pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts from within WordPress.

Install the plugin like you would any normal WordPres Plugin
Login to the admin section of your WordPress site and click the “plugin” section.
Click the “activate” button and then select the “Configure your settings here” option.
Add your Twitter Username and Password and then test to make sure that it is correct.
Select “Yes” from the Create a tweet when you post in your blog option.
If you are also interested in having your tweets post in the sidebar of your WordPress blog, then set the rest of the options before clicking the “Update Twitter Tools Options” button near the bottom of the page. You’re done!

How-to sync your Twitter account to a TypePad powered blog

Unfortunately nobody has developed a widget for TypePad to do the integration for you. I have contacted TypePad directly about it and their response was “Yeah, that is something that we are working on for some future release at some time in the future.” So, while we are holding our breath I have an alternative recommended by a fellow Twitter user(MDY)

Go to TwitterFeed (not associated with Twitter) and login using your OpenID login (OpenID is a standard for providing single sign on between web sites. You probably already have an OpenID account and don’t even know it.)
Provide the URL for your blog’s RSS feed and how often they should look for post to twitter.
Additionally you can create a prefix for my auto-generated blog tweets. So add something like New Article: in the “Prefix each tweet with:” field.

Their server will check your blog’s feed at the specified interval and post any new items to your twitter account. You just sit back and relax! Just a cautionary notice, they do post this disclaimer on their site : “This service is provided on an as-is-and-as-available basis” which sounds like “this service is unreliable” but my experience has been great so far. I have a feeling that this is just a way to protect themselves from any kind of liable suits that someone may try to bring against them.

If someone ever releases a Typepad Twitter widget, I will make sure to update this article. Also, if you know of any other RSS to Twitter services or if you found this article helpful, let me know. You can also follow me on Twitter!