Electronic Spring Cleaning

Posted by Stephanie Panico on Apr 26, 2011 in Features, Social Media News | 0 comments

Let’s be frank, no one really enjoys spring cleaning and coming to terms with what a hot mess your home has turned into during the winter, but sooner or later it must be done. The same goes for cleaning your electronic world. It’s time to cut the clutter. We will go over your inbox, the “friends” that you’ve accumulated and your LinkedIn.

First, let’s organize your email inbox. If you use Google mail, the biggest favor you can do for yourself is turn on the priority inbox setting, which will prioritize your emails in terms of what is most important to you. It’s an adjustable feature, and you can still view your normal inbox.

If you’re like most people who have more than one email account, you can make use of programs such as digsby that will manage all your addresses in one place as well as social media and instant messaging.

Once you’ve prioritized which emails are the most important and have cut out the junk you don’t need, you can start assessing which friends and followers you don’t need too. Social Media Today offers the following great quiz for clearing out your friend clutter:

+Of the Facebook friend requests that you’ve approved in the last six months, how many have you never seen or heard from again, aside from that initial contact?
+Have you bothered to say hello, or introduced yourself on their wall?
+How many of these new friends contact you only with a slew of requests to “like” their pages, or attend their webinars or launches?
+How many have disappeared altogether?

Be honest with yourself about who needs to go. Un-complicate your Twitter feed and your Facebook homepage by cutting out the clutter. You know who they are.

Finally, we can move into keeping all of your social media life organized. I recently covered this topic for our friends at Online Business Owners, and I listed a lot of great programs that you can utilize to be more efficient and successful in your online life. One area not covered in that post that I believe is important to tidy up is your LinkedIn. With more and more employers and business professionals using it to find potential employees and business partners, you can not afford to have your professional page be sloppy. Just remember, cut the clutter and keep it clean. Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) is a great phrase to live by.

I hope these tips help you tidy up your electronic life, and that you give yourself the gift of a fresh start this spring.

5 Blog Posts to Help Your Blog’s SEO

Posted by Stephanie Panico on Apr 12, 2011 in Blog, Blogging, SEO | 4 comments

No matter is if you’re an SEO champion or a newbie, doing your research and learning new techniques to improving your content’s optimization is never a bad thing. Like many emerging medias, search engine optimization is neither something you can master in a day, nor is it a one-time affair.

To get to the optimum level of search engine optimization, a blogger has to understand everything from in-bound linking and proper content writing, to keyword use and tagging. Having a student mentality will help keep you ready to learn enough to be the Yoda of SEO.

These five blog posts will help you no matter what stage of the SEO game you’re at:

1.    SEO is not a one off event, it’s a continuous creative process by Mark Gibson

2.    The 3 Main Components of Search Engine Optimization by Cory Shanes

3.    SEO Tips, Tools, Plugins And Resources by Di Tesco at iBlogZone

4.    HOW TO: Optimize Your Content for Social Discovery by David Sasson at Mashable

5.    Ways of Optimizing Blogs in Search Engines by Erwin Felicilda

Migrating Abilities Shut Off- Facebook Flop?

Posted by Stephanie Panico on Apr 4, 2011 in Social Media News, Updates | 0 comments

Just as quickly as it came, the ability to switch Facebook profiles to pages appears to be shut off.

Perhaps it was the negative press from websites such as Mashable and the apparent issues with the migrations that users were having that brought the new feature to a stop.

While this new feature was popular and helpful to some businesses, it became a social media nightmare for many users who did not fully grasp what they would be losing by changing over their pages. Some of the key complaints about the previous-profiles-turned-pages included:

-Loss of all content including messages, posts, photos, and even user names, which you can’t get back because FB already has it registered as being used;
-Other websites linked to your Facebook profile, such as Twitter and emails, no longer register your page;
-Friend-requesting people you know would only be identified as spam by Facebook, and there is almost no way to say otherwise without reporting the issue every time it happens; and finally,
-Third-party apps go buh-bye.

Overall, most of the reviews I read about the profile-to-page switch were negative, and the only way to fix it, since the change was irreversible, was to have an anonymous Facebook angel change it back for you.

I’ll be interested to see if Facebook brings the ability back to the platform with fresh improvements, or if it would rather not deal with the headache.

I don’t have more than 5,000 friends so it made no sense for me to switch over, but the KnownMedia team and I are interested in hearing more people’s thoughts on it. Did you migrate already? Tell us about your experience and what you thought about it.

Tweet Tricks

Posted by Stephanie Panico on Mar 12, 2011 in Social Media News | 1 comment

With more than 89 million unique visitors and about 640 tweets per second, according to website-monitoring, Twitter is a lightning-fast way to communicate with your audiences.

You want to be sure that your time on Twitter is used correctly, so here I will share some tips and tricks to making your Twitter time more effective.

First, you need to find the right followers to engage with. Use “Find People” to find tweeters who are already your customers and follow them. Now, use Twitter Search to find who else would be a good follower. Search for your company, competitors, the type of organization or industry you are in, specific products, and what problems your customer might be looking for if they were going to use your product. For example, if you represented a spa or massage center, you might search for “pain,” “back pain,” or “body aches.”

Now that you have a group of followers, you have to listen, if you want to be heard. Don’t just jump in to Twitter and start spitting out content before you understand your audience and the conversation they are having. Use hashtags to look for what people are saying about you, your company and industry.

Twitter is very much about the mentality of listening and helping others, not just pushing your company or product at consumers. It is a conversing community, not a place for advertising space. A good rule to follow is listen 80 percent, Tweet 20 percent.

Once you have heard the conversation and understand your Twitter community, start interacting. Here are some best practices:

-  Be a human, not a robot. No one likes talking to automated answering services, and the same applies to social media. Be interactive and real with people.

-  Don’t say anything you don’t want EVERYONE to see. Unlike Facebook where you can have different levels of openness with your posts and comments, Twitter doesn’t have as many filters. Once you Tweet it, especially if you are a large, public company, they will see it.

-   Respond promptly in a professional way. This is pretty straight forward, but here is a good example of what not to do from United Airlines.

These are just a few Twitter tips from me, but there are a lot more out there. What are your tips and tricks for using Twitter?

Social Book Marking for Internet Marketing

Posted by Stephanie Panico on Feb 26, 2011 in Internet Marketing | 4 comments

Social book marking has become an extensive sea of websites on which to take note of and share websites that you find interesting. These sites allow users to keep track or, organize, search, share and manage their bookmarks online.

Websites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious have also become great tools for internet marketers because you can use them at every stage of a campaign. For example, you could conduct research about a specific topic and gain perspective about what consumers think about a brand by searching on reddit. Then you can post your website, article, blog post, etc. on to one or all of these page, which will give it more exposure higher SEO because of linking. Once you’ve posted the link, you can track its progress online by seeing how many “diggs” it received or how many people book marked it via Delicious.

While social book marking has lots of advantages, it is not without flaws. First, to get all of those back links and be able to track the links you post, you have to register on each website, and it can become very time consuming. Second, since social book marking can be done by anyone and everyone there is also an issue of non-expert opinions and incorrect tagging.

There are tons of social book-marking websites out on the web, but certain sites have broader reach than others, and each site appeals to a slightly different audience. Do your research and find out which websites house the target audience(s) you are looking for before devoting lots of energy to one website over another.

According to an article in eBizMBA, the most popular social book-marking websites include Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious and reddit. Here is a mini breakdown of some of these top players:

• Twitter- The micro-blogging site has more than 89 million unique monthly visitors, and by using Twitter search, you can find the people to follow who will matter most to the content you are book marking.
• Delicious- Often used for pages of educational, environmental or technological interest. For example “How to build a website” was one of the top bookmarks at time of this publication. Current and breaking news is also highly shared here.
• StumbleUpon- Used mostly for direct friend-to-friend social sharing based on personal interest. It is broken down into specific topic areas so your page is more likely to be tagged correctly by others.
• Digg- Ranked in second by eBizMBA for most popular social book-marking site, it is mostly used for current news and technology.
• Reddit- A more personal social book-marking website, reddit features many personal findings and strange happenings as well as news. This website has sub-pages of book marks including one titled “WTF.”