How Sharable Is Your Content?

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Mike Angstadt

It’s hard to be a business owner and not love what you do. From the warehouse to the board-room, great business owner’s need to be able to energize, excite, and effect positive change in all facets of their organizations – everyone’s their own brand’s #1 fan. The problem is, your potential customers do not own your business, or even one like it – so how do you create content about things others will find interesting…interesting enough to advocate to their friends by sharing via popular social media channels.

Social Media: Does it Make Sense for your Business?

There are many times that ‘Social Media’ comes up in our new client conversations. Most of the time the conversation goes a bit like this.

New Customer – “So what about Social Media?”
atomni – “Well, What about Social Media?”
New Customer – “Well, I know it’s big. I know a lot of people are on it. But is doing social media really going to reach my market.”

Typically this is where the sidebar conversation of exactly what doing social media means to the New Customer takes a wild tangent – but really there is a very simple answer to the question: Yes.

If you Believe in SEO, Believe in Social Media

If you consider most major search algorithms today, they’re in the business of delivering ‘the best’ web page results to the end-user. This is typically based on metrics measured on other websites – that is, search algorithms answer the question – “What is the website that all of the other websites out there ‘think’ is the best.”
Very quickly, the emphasis put on this quantitative data (like a website’s backlink count) is shifting towards user-based metrics. This means that it will become increasingly important to search algorithms what websites people think are the best, and what better place for search engines to look for mounds of applicable data than Social Media.

People Believe People – and for Free

Identify FAQs, new industry trends, tips, and top X lists to create webpages on your site specifically dedicated to providing useful information about those topics interesting to potential customers…then talk about it! Get on your company’s Twitter account, LinkedIn company profile, or Facebook fan page and start the social content churning. People are way more likely to get moved along the marketing arch by someone they know and you are making it painfully easy for fans to promote your brand for free.

Focus on the Factoid

The little excerpt or blurb of text thrown in on either side of a hyperlink in a Facebook status update or Tweet has a HUGE impact on the clickability of your social media content. Make this something interesting, compelling, even disruptive and you’ll be surprised at the impact it has on the reach of your social media campaigns. Accompanying posts, pins, tweets, and updates with thumbnails and information defining the content can help immensely in social media search results as well. Be sure to check out our post on Social Media Optimization and Integrating Pinterest for WordPress for more information.

Make a Schedule and Stick To It – It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect.

In the every day run-around it’s easy to forget about the little things, don’t. In the infancy of atomni’s content generation efforts we employed a regimented draft, revision, and approval process which we thought was required to preserve the sanctity of our online brand presence – what happened was we’d go weeks without posting anything because the path of resistance was too great. In hindsite, we would have done much better to release smaller content pieces regularly (as we do now) revising, retooling, or created response content to our legacy materials that came off a bit too light or performed well. Finding regular industry publications to draft management responses or releases in conjunction with other marketing efforts you’re already doing like company newsletters or press releases are a great way gain synergies from your traditional marketing and resonate consistency throughout your web marketing campaigns. Consistently releasing even small bites of useful material rather than letting your online content channels lie dormant ensures you won’t loose any momentum.

Get Your Facebook Fan Page Ready for Timeline

Posted on March 13, 2012 by atomni

Individuals may have been noticing a few interface changes in Facebook over the last few months. The ‘Timeline’ profile view is Facebook’s attempt to allow users to craft and tell their own life story in a way they feel best describes them. But how will this effect your business’s Facebook Fan Page? March 30th, 2012 will be the drop-dead date for adopting the new Timeline layout – so be prepared with any customized skins, widgets, apps, or Facebook canvas’s you host in other locations, because things will get shifted around.

What Does This Mean Going Forward?

The timeline layout was generated through thousands of hours of user research and experience design, adopting it means you can leverage all of this great research to maximize the brand command you have in social media.

Your Banner Image

Instead of trying to jam important business information such as your Twitter username, website, phone number, or address into a small left-justified profile picture, the timeline layout gives you a nice wide banner image to best represent your brand online. It’s the first thing people will see when they get to your Fan Page and should be given significantly more consideration in the context of social media camapaigns in the upcoming months. Mirroring homepage slides, special offers, or upcoming events becomes incredibly more powerful than just posting it on your Fan Page Wall.

Get Chronological

The new layout puts an emphasis on when you create which content, so saving all of your company photos until the week before Christmas to upload isn’t going to cut it anymore. You’ll have to make social media content creation an intrinsic and routine part of your online marketing efforts to gain the greatest exposure for your efforts. Customers will also have the progress and age of your content generation efforts may extremely apparent to them, so if you’ve been steering clear of beginning social media marketing efforts – now would be a good time to start.

For more information on how to get started on your own social media marketing campaign, or to discuss further the Timeline Business Fan Page user interface changes upcoming March 30th, 2012 – please contact us anytime.

Social Media Optimization

Posted on February 3, 2012 by atomni

Social media offers unparalleled opportunities for inbound marketing

The dawn of search engine optimization (and really web marketing in general) has opened the gates for flourishing expansion of inbound marketing. It has truly replaced many outbound initiatives simply because it’s more efficient and effective to market people looking for your products already. Many focus on the holy grail of SEO being the best possible way to build sustainable qualified traffic to your website, but slowly social media networks like Facebook are incorporating optimization opportunities. As content aggregators attempt to more ‘intelligently’ serve content to their users, it will become increasingly important to inform them as best as possible about the content you are creating – search engines and social media alike. The first step you can take in optimizing for Facebook, Twitter, or Search Engines is providing any and all information you can to these outlets so they can informatively get it out in front of your target market.

Facebook Meta Tags

This is probably one of the easiest things you can do to maximize the impact of your social media content. You can specify any Open Graph properties (although not all will be used by all content types) with this format
<meta property="og:{tagName}" content="{tagValue}"/>
inside your <head /> tag.

If you’re running WordPress, there is a great little plug-in called (go figure) Facebook Meta Tags Plugin. Either way, you’ll finally get to stop re-copying and re-pasting links into Facebook until it automatically crawls the right thumbnail image. Now you’ll be giving Facebook all the information it needs to decide who should get your updates in their feed & their authority around specific searches.

Customize & Maximize Social Media Results

Taking these efforts a step further, integrating a Fan Page for your business or website is the next huge step in making sure that anything you do on social media gets put in front of as many people as possible. Dynamically setting the creation date or categories of content can dramatically increase the net impact of your social media content generation efforts.

Reach More on Social Media

Factor out a Factoid, Pose a hypothetical question, do anything you can to tease interest out of your market because the ripple effect of sharing, liking, and interacting with your social media content is gargantuan! It also helps to keep a variety of shares, posts, polls, videos, & images streaming on your Wall to demonstrate the human component to Facebook’s algorithms and keep your Fan’s engaged.

Look for More to Come

As Facebook continues to grow into a mature company, you will continue to see an increasing number of OpenGraph properties being included in their algorithms in attempts to better serve content to it’s users. Once you make some of these changes to better inform Facebook of what content you are creating, look for notable increases in Facebook referral traffic & impressions.

RE: Facebook Thinks Email is “Probably Going Away”

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Michael Dugas

This is a comment posted to an article by Chris Crum, posted on WebProNews on June 24. 2010, which can be found here.

“I must comment that Facebook’s recent integration of SMS technologies has illustrated the sentiment that Ms. Sandberg expressed during her speech: you can now use your mobile number just as you would have used your email address to recover lost passwords, and indeed receive whatever updates you feel the need to be bothered with during the day.

Although it is true that a valid email address is still required to create an account, once created, you could easily manage one from there on out without ever needing to receive another email from Facebook. I have not seen any statistics regarding the demographics of Facebook SMS functionality users, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see these features used more heavily by younger users, which could indicate – as Ms. Sandberg expressed – that this is an increasing trend.

I do agree with you that email is a catalyst for social media interactions, and also with the notion that email is not is any risk of complete obsolescence in the near future. However, more than anything i think this argument is one of rhetoric. Whether SMS, email, or a message through a social media platform, the medium is secondary to the information contained. These technologies and their uses are converging on our mobile devices and the distinctions between them are quickly eroding from the end user’s perspective.”