If you actively tweet and are looking to build followers, here is a round up of useful links of “follow me” twitter buttons, graphics and icons to add to your blog or websites.
Share Your Blog
Make it easy for your blog readers to tweet, digg, facebook your posts:
More Auto Tweeters
Feed your twitter, or get more enhanced with URL shorteners
Soon, follow mes and embedded tweets.
There are far too many ways to add social media links and icons to your blog. However, if you are playing the social media PR game, it’s a necessary part of your web presence plumbing, those share, tweet this, facebook icons on your site and your blog.
Up to now, I had been happy with my socialable plugin, resisting the siren call of adding bolder and bigger social media icons to my sidebar. Then I looked at AddThis.
AddThis button bar is simple to add to your blog
You can see it in my sidebar to the right. I still have sociable but I updated the settings to show it only on individual blog posts so I didn’t have dueling social media button bars on my home page.
AddThis also generates cut and paste code for your website, blogger.com and myspace for four different types of buttons.
Do you buzz? If you tweet, facebook, or even blog, you may want to buzz too. Google took on social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook on their own turf by launching Google Buzz.
If you have a gmail account, you couldn’t have missed it, the first time you have to click through an interstitial buzz setup page on the way to your gmail inbox, and once in, the colorful buzz icon is on the left nestled in among your folders.
The initial launch caused some privacy alarms, and google backed off from automatically linking your other google activity, such as Picasa to Buzz.
It seems to be catching on. I already got two buzzes from one of my gmail chat mates and I noticed that Joel Comm is publicizing his Buzz profile. And Mashable, the venerable social media blog, already has a new Buzz icon next to it’s Twitter and Facebook icons.
I went ahead and created a basic profile so I can join the party but deliberately left many things inactive or blank, I’ll watch how the privacy debate unfurls first.
It starts out by getting requests from people, at first a few, then more. You give in and build your Facebook page, or recruit the kid down the street to help you do it. Then you start looking at other people’s profiles and see people you know. Next thing you know you are connecting to people you haven’t talked to for years and it all snowballs from there.
It’s no wonder that Facebook attracted 25 million new users in the last month alone.
Facebook, a phenomenon that started with the under 35 set, is maturing in both demographics and uses. Facebook was born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and originally only for college students. A year later, high school students were allowed in. In 2006, Facebook got rid of its gatekeepers and began letting anyone in.
Over the next year, it grew from 12 million to 50 million users. Then it launched versions in Spanish, French and German. Today about 175 million people are on Facebook.
While most Facebook users are younger than 35, so many older people are now using it that the portion of the college-age users has dropped to 41 percent. Robert Scoble, a blogging and social media technology expert, says eventually Facebook’s popularity will slow — but not any time soon. And it remains hip with the college crowd.
“Having older people there doesn’t affect your experience,” Scoble said. “It’s segregated. You have your friends and your whole experience there is based on who your friends are.”
Of course some overlap occurs. Parents are finding that Facebook is a good way to keep in touch with their college age children who previously forgot to email or call. Of course some young people in college may be a little wary of their parents keeping tabs on them that way, however most just remove a few pictures that the parents might not appreciate.
The older crowd is here to stay on Facebook, in fact UC Davis is examining the “effectiveness of social media used by the higher education sector to communicate philanthropic news”. In other words, UC Davis thinks there might be enough people on Facebook with enough cash to help fund higher education. Since Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign, which heavily leveraged social media, it has become acceptable to run social media fundraising campaigns. Entrepreneurs are following suit and are using it to reinforce and create new business connections.
Think about the essence of a marketing campaign. You decide on your messaging and branding and with certain key activities you build momentum and buzz towards your event. This translates well to Facebook. Your Info tab .. or even better your business page, informs everyone about and even brands you and your business and your Facebook activity builds momentum towards the event you are marketing. It’s a natural fit.
Whether you plan to use the internet purely for personal reasons or you are looking for professional networking, Facebook will open doors you didn’t even know were there.
The Economist recently had an article noting the rise of the “faceless bosses”. Outsized personalities such as Jack Welch and Robert Nardelli are gone or retired. Carly Fiorina has turned her attention to politics.
While clearly, in today’s turbulent times, keeping your head down is attractive, I found this article an odd juxtaposition with the revolution in branding that social media is creating. Corporate branding, ho hum, personal branding is what is hot. If you haven’t figured out, you are brandU. What we say and do on twitter, facebook and our blogs becomes part of the gestalt that defines the online perception of who we are and what we have to offer.
So what does your brand say about you? Is it disorganized and not clear? Show me yours! As someone whose brand is not as together as I would like, I would love to see a a great example. Just post your URL or social media handle
below.
Lots of thoughts provoking stats, set to music by Fatboy Slim.
Twitter is certainly having a momentous summer. There was the recent DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, that rendered it inoperative. And the battle lines between it and facebook became more clearly drawn. Twitter is definitively morphing before our eyes, as I recently alluded to in my “lost its shine” post, but the question is into what?
The two trends to watch are use of twitter for branding, as Martha Stewart has, and the its search engine.
If you haven’t jumped yet onto the twitter bandwagon, check out this blog post I got from the Web 2.0 group on LinkedIn, an excellent group of links on using twitter.
Interesting thing about observing trends, you can watch move them through groups as a wave. Let’s take twitter for example, it first became popular with the tech hip as a cool way to share just about anything, in 140 characters or less. I loved twitter at events such as the Web2.0 expo, following the instantaneous commentary on the speakers, and of course knowing where the cool party was.
In the last six months, it’s become the latest must have tool for entrepreneurial marketing. Talks about using social media for marketing your business have become a staple at business networking events. And with good reason, MarketOutLoud filled seats for it’s marketing events with it’s facebook connections. Some became social media divas. For the savvy it’s been a great lead generation tool.
But twitter has recently become less fun to use, at least for me. It seems like every day I get a follow request from someone that has less than 40 updates (boring!), or even worse, zero. And people that I chose to follow, immediately DM’ed me with a tweet with a link to their product. These get unfollowed really quickly.
On the other hand, facebook which I initially didn’t like much has become a better place to hang out, I have enough friends who post interesting things to catch my interest. The walled garden aspect of facebook, derided with frustration by some, seems to keep the riffraff out, the quality connections in.
And surprisingly, teenagers, a group you would have thought been the early adopters, don’t use twitter either. As my son’s sniffs “my Dad uses twitter”.
So if you have never used twitter, is it safe to ignore it now? Absolutely, not. Twitter is still a major force to be reckoned with. As evidenced by the recent Iranian election unrest, twitter is where the news breaks first. Fast breaking events that grab broad interest is where twitter shines, and it can be an excellent way to search for news. And there are influencers in the twittersphere that can direct significant traffic, if you want to play in the twitterspace for business reasons, at the very least find the ones in your industry to keep a pulse on your market.
And if you didn’t know what a DM was, it’s high time you figured it out.
In the past few years, Social Media and Social Media Marketing have become buzz- words. This is due to the popularity of sites like MySpace, Digg, etc. The social media have two components – user generated contents and the ability to form networks of friends for sharing contents.
In sites like MySpace and Facebook users create their profile pages and use texts, pictures, and videos to embellish the pages. They can then share those contents with others in their friends’ network, or the social network
In sites like Digg, YouTube, Flickr users submit a summary of news articles, pictures, videos and they vote on the contents submitted by others. Popular contents are featured on the homepage and it drives massive amount of traffic to support your Internet Marketing.
There are many variations of the two models described above, including a combination of the two.
Using the social media sites to promote your product or services (or a website) is called social media marketing. There are two types of traffic you get when your content becomes popular in a social media site.
The primary traffic or the direct traffic comes from the site where it becomes popular. For sites like Digg, it can be huge and your site should be ready to handle the surge in traffic without crashing.
When your site becomes popular in a social media site, people talk about your site and the post that becomes popular. They will put a url to the content. The secondary traffic or the indirect traffic flows from those url long after the surge due to the primary traffic is over.
So, what are the benefits of primary and secondary traffic from the social media sites? The primary traffic exposes your site to people who have no other means of knowing about your existence. Some of those visitors will become regulars to your site if you are providing something that they want on a regular basis.
The greatest benefit is the natural url to your site given by others because they want to discuss your offering. Natural urlfrom a large number of relevant sites improve your search engine rankings and organic search traffic.
Social media & Internet Marketing lets you expose your site to a large group of people. If your search engine traffic has leveled off, shifting your focus to the social media marketing and becoming successful in that will take you to the next level in search engine traffic.
The only other alternative for increasing your search engine traffic is Internet Marketing & pay per click advertisement. If you are already running a PPC campaign, you can continue your PPC campaign through out the year to sustain increased traffic from search engines at a cost.
Social media marketing is free and making your site popular a couple of times in a year is enough to sustain increased traffic through out the year.