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Harnessing the power of Social Media: Keeping your fans hooked



As every successful blogger knows, you need a Facebook fan page: one that encourages fan engagement – whether through posts, likes or recommends. But a really successful fan page needs the dedicated attention that a lone blogger can’t always provide – until now.

Scheduling automated updates and posts might seem fraught with potential disaster, but it shouldn’t. Today’s tools make it a breeze, and combined with a few invaluable tips (which, naturally, we’ll tell you) you’ll literally be able to do it in your sleep.

First of all – use Hootsuite to schedule your updates. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is not just to maintain your Facebook page, but other social media sites like Twitter, and keep your audience engaged.

Hootsuite will also get rid of those pesky problems with appearance – if you’ve ever woken up to find your carefully constructed post has been mangled by RSS Graffiti or Social RSS, then it’s time to switch.

Next, consider carefully the best time to post. You might have fans across the globe, but if you’re only posting at one time, half of them will be tucked up in bed. So think about your target audience and make sure they are prioritised.

Effectively segmenting your audience will also help – for example, if you have a fan base in the UK and the US, a message tailored to the US audience for when the UK are offline, and vice versa, will keep you on the ball. But don’t update several times in a row – you’ll just encourage ‘like’ fatigue in your fans.

And finally, because fan page are about encouraging two-way conversation, make sure your posts are conducive to this! Ask questions, make a witty comment or quote – you are looking for active responders, rather than just passive listeners.

Harnessing the power of Social Media: Tools for School

Struggling to understand the social media phenomenon, and how it relates to your B2B marketing? Sorry to break it to you, but 80% of your efforts can be alleviated by the services and tools available to you – if you know where to look. And if you don’t, don’t worry. We’ve trawled the net and found the top tools for you:

Salesforce for Twitter

Pull in and monitor Twitter feeds and accounts within the web-based CRM giant Salesforce.com. Follow up leads and generate cases based on a tweet in the CRM, and the fully integrated platform lets you monitor and evaluate them with your regular workflow.

Hootsuite

Manage multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn and WordPress blogs, and set up multiple access for your people. Post messages across different social networks, track stats and receive alerts. Oh, and don’t pay anything – it’s free!

Co-Tweet

A CRM tool that offers the same benefits as Hootsuite, but specifically for Twitter. You can also keep an eye on trends and keywords to generate leads. Also free, unless you want the enterprise option used by the likes of Ford and Jetblue – a *cough* snip at $1500 per month.

SocialTALK

A definite must-have, use this tool to control your presence across various platforms. Scheduling posts, monitoring traffic, feedback and analysis and managing user access all become a breeze – particularly as everything is available on one user-friendly dashboard.

Radian6 (Now owned by Salesforce)

This genius little tool doesn’t wait for your customers to come to you – it trawls the social media world listening to online tweets, posts and blogs and tells you when someone is in need of your product or service. Integrate it with Salesforce.com for maximum lead generation.

Spredfast

Starting at $50 a month, Spredfast offers most of the services above but also throws in metric reporting and tracking so you can see what methods are working and which aren’t, and keep an eye on other industry or competitor sites.

Social Radar

It’s strengths lie in its social monitoring and analysis capability, and alerts you to conversation fluctuations, topics from key influencers and sentiment analysis. Pricey at $200 a month but if your reach in the social media world is extensive, it could be exactly what you need to stay on top.

TruPULSE

As well as tracking conversations, topics and keywords like Radian6, it also follows the tone and perceptions of a brand so you know how actual and potential customers are feeling about your product. It also has the great monitoring potential of Social Radar, flagging crisis and customer service issues so you can step in and save the day.

Viralheat

Another monitoring and analytics service that also includes viral video stats, it differentiates itself with the additional service by allowing you to target profiles by location, and by having its own API that means you can integrate it into other business solutions.

Sentiment metrics

This is where you can really dig deep! You might have 300 Twitter mentions, but what does that mean? By tracking the in-depth discussions on forums and blogs, you can get a clearer, detailed picture of your service or product and its impact on social media communities.

With so many tools available to you on today’s worldwideweb, which one is your favourite?

How To Mass Export All Of Your Facebook Friends’ Private Email Addresses

A few days ago I requested that Facebook finally allow us to download email addresses for all of our friends. Facebook says this isn’t allowed because you only own the data you add to Facebook, not data that your friends add.

Their statement was, in part (entire statement here):

The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information. Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.

We pointed out that Facebook already allows mass exporting of friends’ private email addresses via deals with Microsoft, Yahoo and possibly other partners. And we suggested Facebook amend their statement to add the following bolded language:

A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums, unless it’s with a partner that’s making it worth our while.

Anyway, for those of you who want to download all those email addresses, here’s how.

1. Create a Yahoo email account. Even if you have an old one, create a new one so that the imported contacts are clean. It only takes a minute. You’ll get a confirmation screen that looks like this, below. Click on import contacts “Get Started” link and then choose Facebook. Note – do not use Chrome for this, it doesn’t appear to work in that browser.

2. Authorize Yahoo in the Facebook pop up and then wait a few seconds. You’ll see a confirmation screen like this:

3. Ok, you’ve now imported the names and email addresses of all your Facebook friends into Yahoo. Now just click “tools” in Yahoo mail and export. CSV format is a good format for uploading to Gmail or your desktop contact book. Save the file to your desktop, and you’re done.


4. Enjoy your new contacts. You’ve just done something that Facebook says you have no right to do, using tools provided by Facebook.

Warren Knight thanks Michael Arrington

Facebook: The Greatest CRM Platform in the World?

Now this is something to think about …Jacob Morgan has moved his focus into SCRM (Social CRM) over the past year, and has been writing some very interesting articles on the subject.

Ok, so it’s not exactly a fully fledged CRM system (yet) but when you compare the information you have on a client or lead in Salesforce with the information that Facebook has on the same person the difference and quality of information is mind-boggling.  Not only that but Facebook permeates across the online world like an out of control growing snowball.  Let’s also not forget the mobile dominance that Facebook has, it’s hard to find someone with a smartphone that doesn’t have the Facebook app installed.

Of course Facebook lacks many CRM features such as sales and marketing automation, workflows, pipeline management, and a lot of other things.  However, Facebook as an information source is in my opinion by far the most accurate and comprehensive personal database repository that exists and that’s probably what it’s going to stay as.  Facebook also allows for a unique customer interaction on both an individual and company level (connect with employees at Amazon or fan Amazon on their Facebook page) that also provides content and context for those interactions in a bi-directional way.  You wouldn’t be able to use Facebook instead of something such as a Salesforce but it’s always interesting to think about the “what if you could” scenario.  Imagine Facebook as it stands but built with a complete sales and marketing automation system complete with workflows, pipeline management, forecasting, and everything else a good CRM system offers you.

One of the interesting things I keep thinking about is somehow hacking the “like” button that Facebook allows you to put on any webpage and having it trigger some sort of a workflow in a CRM system when someone clicks on it.  Let’s say someone is interested in a product or service that you have to offer, or perhaps they want to join a webinar you are hosting.  I think it would be interesting if someone were able to click one button that automatically populates form fields with information from that person’s Facebook profile that then gets inputted into Salesforce (or something like it) which triggers an email confirmation for the event or perhaps emails recommended meeting times.

I don’t think it’s ever going to happen and we’re already seeing vendors integrate social data into their CRM products but hey, a guy can dream right?  I think the possibilities for Facebook as a CRM system can go on and on but I’m curious what you think about this.  Any ideas or thoughts?

Warren Knight thanks Jacob Morgan