There are things to think about before starting. The most important is your time. Viral marketing through social media really requires a lot of original content and a great amount of time each day and you have to understand the value of your time. This is where Authority SEO helps their clients. Many of the available tools are free to use some are not. That does not mean they don’t come at a high cost, because they most certainly do. They can cost valubale human resource time and customers if not done correctly. It takes time to set up accounts, create content for blogs, to tweet on a regular basis, to tie all of your marketing together and to focus your social media on your main gool.

Before you start with social marketing, make sure your strategy or goal is clear. There is a lot of social media hype and peer pressure to use these technologies. Just make sure you clearly understand your key goals and objectives. For example, are you trying to build direct sales with customers, improve positioning of your product or service, or build your authority in a specific area? Answering these critical questions will help you move forward with your strategy.

Your first step should be to verify whether the audience you are trying to reach is already using social media. If your target market aren’t using Twitter or Facebook, then why spend you resourse there? You also need to do your homework on where the audience you are trying to reach already exists. Are they on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter? Are they joining groups or creating new ones? These are all key questions to understanding your audience and how to best engage them.

What are some of the immediate benefits that small businesses are finding with social media?

Well, most small businesses will tell you that social networking can help foster stronger relationships with customers, enable a faster vehicle to answer customer questions, incorporate customer feedback, and build awareness for their expertise. One thing that is gaining prowless in social media is reviews. Customer reviews are becoming more and more important online and this is a good to convert lookers into buyers. 

Many small businesses are still trying to understand how social media can ring the cash register, and Authority SEO has that answer. A Phoenix based website called Natures Organic Market uses Twitter to successfully drawl in followers and send them coupons to use on their website. The company has created followers by posting interesting tweets and sends out the occassional coupon code to use. That means every time the company has something to say and people will receive the message and could retweet it to their friends and so on, potentially reaching way more than Natures Organic’s followers.  Before Twitter, this was lost profit. If you are ready to take a dip into social media give us a call.

 As a small business or large one, the way you spend your time is critical. So if you do decide to pursue social media, make sure that you have the proper tools to help you succeed.  You have to be social at all times or lose that business to your competitors.

As it stands right now Google shows Twitter updates in its regular search engine results page and is the main feature of its real time search boxes.  Also, Bing incorporates Facebook “like” qualities to its search rankings.  The level of involvement of social media in search results will only increase.

Have you ever read something on social media and you know that it was just generic filler information.  Social media is about interacting with your audience or future customers.  The best way to use social media is to engage and interact with your audience.  If you want your information to “go viral” than it has to be genuine of interest to people.

Genuine interest is important as it relates to social media.  Just think of the last thing that you really like in Facebook or Youtube.  What was it that captured your attention and made you send it to your friends and family?

There is no one size fits answer for a company to use social media.  What is universal is having real people handle you presence.  People see auto filler information though real people updating content have the ability to engage and deliver results with social media.

I believe spam is the #1 threat to Twitter.  Twitter needs to get a handle on the automatic spam that is every where in Twitter.  You now have to very careful when clicking on a link in trending topics as it could send you to a site ready to dump spyware and viruses onto your computer.  I personally use Trend Micro for security which prevents me from opening dangerous web pages.  I like reading information on Twitter and don’t really want to have to rely on Trend Micro to keep me out of harms way.  As of right now I don’t even click into ‘trending topics’ in Twitter anymore.

I hope Twitter gets a handle on the spam running wild through their service so we can enjoy the many uses of Twitter.

The average Twitter account with more than 1,750 followers tweets more than 10 times a day

9 Interesting Facts About Twitter

1. 72.5% of all Twitter accounts were created in the first half of 2009
2. 85.3% of Twitter members tweet less than once a day
3. 21% of Twitter accounts are blank with no posts
4. 93.6% of Twitter profiles have less than 100 followers and 92.4% follow less than 100 profiles
5. 5% of all Twitter accounts create 75% of all tweets
6. New York has the most Twitter profiles with Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston right behind
7. 50% of all tweets are created using tools or mobile devices instead of logging into Twitter.com
8. 53% of Twitter users are women
9. 15% of users who claim are marketers follow more than 2,000 profiles, while only 0.29% of all Twitter users follow more than 2,000 profiles

The one key observation through all the Twitter research I have read is it seems there are more empty tweets to followers who never see them.  Twitter has in some cases become empty self promotion.

How do I get my tweet retweeted

The goal of posting in Twitter is you want readers to find your information like it enough to want to share it with their friends and followers.  This is why what makes a good post worthy of being retweeted is important if you want to increase your online visibility through Twitter.

The following stats on what makes a good tweet for retweet is from Dan Zarrella.  The data was collected over an extremely large sample size of over 10 million tweets.

Science of How to Get Retweets

Links: the data showed that only 18.96% of all tweets include a link while 56.69% of retweets included a link.  If you want to get more retweets post with links to interesting information.

Bigger words: the average Tweet is 1.58 syllables where as the average Retweet is 1.62 syllables.  The idea here is more complex ideas are retweeted more often than simple ideas.

Higher Education: the opposite of what you might think though it takes a higher reading level or education to get retweeted.  The tests showed that Retweets needs at least 6.13 years of school on average as compared to only 5.88 years for Tweets.  Smarter information is far more valuable for people to pass on.

New Concepts: this is a more obvious result that posts that are unique or novel in their information have a much greater chance of being retweeted.  The average random word in a Tweet is found throughout all Tweets 89.19 other times while 16.37 times for Rewteets.  This goes with all viral media that novelty wins.

What you had for lunch is not worthy: this should be good for all the Twitter haters who think Twitter is nothing more than people posting what they had for lunch, that they are jogging now, or on their way to get a hair cut.  Self reference of what you are doing has the lowest percentage of rewteeting though it is the highest percentage of what people tweet.

So there you have it.  If you want to get rewteeted more spend less time talking about what you are doing and spend more time offering your followers information that will challenge them and be different that what they read every day.

Retweet this post and you will be eligible for free Macbook Pro computer

To win you have to use the hashtag: #moonfruit in one of your Twitter posts.  Moonfruit is picking one winner per day with winners being announced at @moontweet.

What is amazing is the promotion is working and beating Michael Jackson, Iran, and everything else on Twitter today.  I think we are going to see more of these as giving away free stuff seems to really work on Twitter.  The question will be will this popularity today translate in increase sales, that has yet to be determined.

You may think that having thousands of followers is great.  It could be.  What would thousands of followers mean to your company if they were empty followers.  What do I mean empty followers?  You can easily tell the difference between a follower who is interested in your posts and a spammer or even just someone hoping to increase their own Twitter account who cares nothing about what you are talking about.

The reason I bring up this disction is that many people are attempting to get thousands of followers with little regard to the quality.  This can be a good approach as it will in esence increase your online visibility and give you a better chance of finding people who are interested in your tweets.

The other option is using slower processes of building your Twitter followers though each follower is higher quality and are more ap to take action on information you provide.  I will comment next to each of the steps as to what group of attending followers it belongs to.

3 Steps to More Twitter Followers

1. Twitter Trains: Twitter Trains are websites that you basically become followers of other people looking to create followers and then people join you.  It is all about “all aboard.”  These followers are of low value as your followers only did this so they can get followers just like you did.  It can work well as you can lots of followers quickly where some could want to follow you for real.  The one thing a lot of followers does is it looks good to potential new followers checking out your account.
2. Follow others: You can use the search feature in Twitter or join the Twitter accounts from websites that you enjoy their information.  The goal is that they will then follow you back.  If they chose to follow you back they are much higher quality then Twitter Trains as they made a choice to follow you because they wanted to.  You also will be on their follower list that others can see.
3. Follow me on your site: You can put a link back to your Twitter account on your blog, website, and online commenting profile(Authority SEO uses DISQUS).  This is a slower process though each person you get from this method is of the highest value as they have either read your comments or your website and find your opinion valuable.  You can search online to find nice Twitter icons you can use.  Check out our Twitter icon to your right.

Look out for email saying “Your friend invited you to twitter!”, and the fake Twitter email address is invitations @twitter.com.  Instead of a link the email carries an attachment with a zip file.  One downloaded onto your computer havoc will ensue.

The issue with this worm is that it isn’t spreading through the Twitter.com website or through Twitter accounts.  This worm uses the overall popularity of Twitter so that people not on Twitter will open it and download the attachment.

If you do get the email mark it as spam and don’t download anything.

For good coversations on posts it is helpful to know who you are.  With DISQUS service you can now post comments using your Twitter or Facebook account.  Many people stay logged into these two social media while they read online and can instantly increase the visibility of their profiles by adding good comments.  Check it out and post a comment on one of Authority SEO’s posts.

One other really cool feature is that DISQUS shows who has added the post to their social networks.  You can see who has tweeted your post, added it to Youtube, and many other of the popular social media sites.

Myspace is now laying off jobs as they are over saturated with employees expecting their rocket growth to continue.

I am not saying not to have a presence on the social networks far from it.  What I am saying what will not come and go is a consistent approach to building your own successful website.  If you spend too much of your resources on social media and that site goes under all that work will be lost.  Even if someone some day over takes Google they still will still need to deliver to people effective websites that deliver the information people are looking for.