March 12, 2013

5 apps that do the marketing work for you

Photo courtesy of noeliamarejo via Creative Commons

Reach a broader audience with the help of these marketing apps

Guest post by Megan Totka

Developing and executing strong marketing campaigns takes a lot of work. In large corporations, entire departments are devoted to this task. For small businesses and sole proprietors, marketing tasks often fall on employees or business owners that wear other hats, too. There is literally not enough time in the workday to accomplish all the promotional tasks that large and small companies wish they could achieve, especially considering the vast outreach opportunities the Internet age presents.

What if I told you that there is a way to do less work but actually reach more people with your company news, products and services? Interested? While I can’t advise you on the best ways to find more money in your budget, I can offer some suggestions developed by others that will give your business a smart marketing advantage. Continue reading →

March 5, 2013

What’s the value of a Facebook like?

Increase your fan base with an SEO approach to social media marketing

Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, businesses, nonprofits, Facebook administrators, anyone with a Facebook page.

Guest post by Rowan Casey

Everybody with a Facebook Page wants to have millions of likes, but unless you are a celebrity or the owner of a famous business, you’re probably still working on increasing your fan base.

However, even if you are among the least famous of people, your chances of having thousands — or even tens of thousands — of likes is still within reach. For many Facebook Pages, this is because there are a variety of methods of buying likes or obtaining Facebook fans through paid advertising and promotional methods. Still working on upping your ‘like’ count? Keep reading. Continue reading →

February 14, 2013

Why you should cross-post by hand

Why manually handling cross-posts keeps content in top form

Writing once and sharing many times is very compelling as is the sort of evergreen content that you can share repeatedly. There are exceptions, of course, but you should think twice about automatically sharing everything. Why? Well, cross-posting tools don’t make your cross-posts look as good as they could.

In this new world of Flipbook, Pinterest, and the new Google+, you need to make sure everything looks right: the correct photo or image (Facebook and Google+ allow you to cycle through the photos to find the perfect illustration), the correct post title (sometimes Facebook grabs an ugly title and you’re allowed to edit the title copy — though you cannot do that with G+), and the correct post description (both Google+ and Facebook allow you to delete or remove the description copy, though Facebook allows you to even edit the description copy.) Continue reading →

February 11, 2013

SocialOomph offers essential Twitter tools

Go beyond bulk uploading with SocialOomph’s suite of tools

There are some Web apps that have withstood the test of time — tools that I still use and sometimes abuse. Let’s look at what SocialOomph offers through its Pro account.

Though there are quite a few features that SocialOomph offers, I use it for a couple of things that it does very well: prospecting folks to follow on Twitter based on the keywords as well as the hashtags they use in their profiles and tweets, and also queuing up loads and loads of evergreen bulk tweets that can seed my personal (as well as my clients’) Twitter feeds over time while my team and I are busy being much more responsive and timely with the tweets that we add by hand when we’re online and active. SocialOomph makes this easy and a little more flexible than the other tools I’ve used. Continue reading →

January 29, 2013

Listen & engage to build a trusted community

Grow your sphere of influence through reciprocity and generosity

So many people ask me what my secret is: to my Klout score (77), to my Twitter followers (43.5k), and to my acknowledged influence online, for what it’s worth. They wonder how I gamed Klout, where I bought my followers, and what PR firm got me into Forbes. Well, there surely are shortcuts and you can apparently game Klout and buy followers, friends, and Likes. I have tried out many of them over time but I don’t believe that growing and pruning Twitter followers or paying money for followers and Likes actually builds a social media community.

Surely, all that buying and gaming does something, but it’s not community. Maybe it’s for bragging rights, maybe access to perks, or perhaps just to establish to the people in your space that you’re really a social media player and not someone who ignored social media as an essential aspect of your organization until last Thursday. Continue reading →

January 28, 2013

Are you ready for the place graph?

Jason Wilson, co-founder of Platial, in San Francisco on Thursday (iPhone photo by JD Lasica).

Platial helped pioneer place-based social networking

This is the first of a multi-part series on geolocation startups and services.

Target audience: Entrepreneurs, founders, startups, geolocation services, mobile ad networks, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

For years, entrepreneurs, tech observers and funders have known two things about the geolocation space: It holds an enormous amount of promise, and it’s taking an awfully long time to get there.

Geolocation startups are hot in Silicon Valley right now, from Zkatter, a San Francisco-based startup from British young gun Matt Hagger that wants you to capture and share moments in real time through mobile video, to Findery, the venture-backed San Francisco startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake that wants you to leave notes, media and digital objects for others at specific locations.

What’s my connection with geoloco? For the past half year I’ve been working on a geolocation startup called Placely (register for the beta here). We’re still early in development, so I’ll talk more about our plans for Placely in a future post. But today I think it’s worth doing a quick survey of how far we’ve come (not very) and how far we still have to go as geolocation gets ready for its closeup. Continue reading →