Are Social Media Your Minions?

This post is very different from everything else I have done on this
blog; but it should help drive home the point that social media platforms
should work in unison and not independantly.

Here are three of the best minions I have ever had working for me. I have
given each one some orders. They are as follow:

Minion #1: Twitter – Twitter, when someone runs a Google search there will
be 10 results on the first page. Your job is to make my name, my
reputation, and what I have to offer appear as all ten of those top search
results. By doing this we can knock all opposition off the first page of the
search results.

Minion #2: Blogs – Blogs, your objective is to continually give the world great
information. Tell them what they want to hear and give them a longing to
come back to see what you have to say next time. Then, create interest and
desire within the reader. Persuade the reader that we are awesome and that
they will do anything for us. Convince them that they need us!

Minion #3: Facebook – Facebook, your mission is to direct our fans. If we are
needing to push them to our blog and feed them information you will give
them incentives to go there. If we need people to go to Twitter, to help
increase page rankings, you will convince the fans that they need to go to
Twitter. Do whatever is necessary to guide the world in the direction we
desire.

By having my minions work together I can create an effective plan for world
domination. If they do not work together I will be left with a team of
minions who are aimlessly trying to do something but will not be able to do
so effectively.

1. Use Twitter to get your company, products, and services all over the first
page of Google.

2. Use your blog to inform your target market and to create a desire for
what you have to offer.

3. Use Facebook as a way to guide your fans to do whatever it is that needs to
be done. This could be retweeting your tweets, posting comments on your
blog, giving feedback about a product, or something else. Facebook should
be used to direct your fans.

By making your social media platforms work together you will find your
social media campaigns to be much more successful than if they are not
working together.

Use your minions and rule the world!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Choose The Right Blog Platform

Where to begin?
When starting a blog for your business there are three different platforms you
should consider using. From what I’ve seen the top two blog platforms are
WordPress and Blogger. [I’ll talk about the third platform in a moment.]

You can always find other platforms to use but these two seem to be the most
popular.

WordPress and Blogger

• Both platforms are easy to use in that they allow for easy customization
  of your blog appearance.
• Both platforms give your blog excellent visibility to search engine
  crawlers.
• WordPress is strict about having not advertising or spamming through
  the blogs that are hosted.
• WordPress has blogs with higher quality content than Blogger.
• If you are planning to use your blog to promote your products or
  services you probably don’t want to use WordPress unless you are very
  subtile in the way you advertise them.
• Blogger is less strict about having products and services displayed on
  the hosted blogs than WordPress.
• Because businesses can advertise, Blogger blogs do not generally have
  the same level of quality content as WordPress. They are more spam
  and advertisement oriented.
• Blogger will however allow you to speak more freely about your
  products and services.

The third option for your blog is to have it hosted from your website. If you
have your own website with blogging capabilities I would recommend
using this option over the first two options. The reason for this is that
having a blog on your own website will greatly increase the flow of traffic to
your website.

Better to send people to your website than to have them go to a third-party
and then hope they come to your website.

A perfect example
I recently built a social media website for my consultation
business. My site does not have blogging capabilities. Because of this I
am going to invite you to my site.

Click on Joshua Lyons to visit my site.

Will you visit my site? I don’t know. I can’t guarantee you will click the
link and boost my website traffic. If this blog were on my website you
would be boosting my traffic statistics as you read this right now.

Good luck with choosing the best site for hosting your blog!

You can click of following link to read my blog post on why We Need to Blog.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Please leave feedback in the comments option below if you can provide more
useful information about blogging platforms. Thanks!

Why You Shouldn’t Let Everyone Follow You

Let’s pretend you own a high-end women’s sunglasses store. A mysterious yet magical man comes up to you and tells you he will drive some traffic to your store. You can either have a flood of traffic in one day but cannot
select the traffic demographic or you can have a custom picked list of fashionable women, but would have to wait a whole week. Which would you choose?

Obviously you would choose the second option. Why spend time selling expensive women’s glasses to a crowd of men, children, homeless and uninterested people?

This same principle is true with using Twitter.

If you are wanting to have a successful Twitter campaign you need to locate your primary target audience and find out how to effectively communicate with them.

You want to have as many followers on Twitter as possible but there are some key points to remember.

1. If you follow too many people at once you could appear as a spammer. Limit yourself to no more than 1oo followers a day.
2. You want to keep the follower/following ratio close. Not more than a 10% difference.

Takeing a little extra time to find your target market is well worth the effort.

Develop a quality following.

1. Go to Twellow and follow your target audience. Follow 50-100 people a day.
2. Know your key audience so that you can craft tweets that will be of interest to your followers and will likely be retweeted.

The benefits:

1. Get Google and Bing to index your tweets more often by having your followers retweet your keywords they like.
2. You can effectively monitor your followers (target market) and get to understand their needs and wants. [You can’t do this if your followers are not in your target market.]
3. Increase your brand awareness and get more customers.

Final tip: Lead your Twitter followers to your Facebook account. Facebook is where you can build the strongest relationship with them. Think of Twitter as a business card and Facebook as a one-on-one dinner.

Happy follower hunting!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Twitter Tips – Things You Should Know

“If excellence is an option why settle for anything less.” by Mike Gorman. If you are going to use Twitter you should use it with excellence. Here are some tips that can make the difference between mediocre Twitter use and excellent Twitter use.

• Make sure your bio includes keywords. Google looks for keywords in the bio. Because of this you should try to include as many keywords as possible in this section.

• You can create a custom Twitter landing page to prevent people from seeing a bunch of random 140 character tweets. You may have great content on your news feed, but the first impression a potential customer gets should be controlled. You are able to ensure that your first time visitors will see what you want them to see by creating a custom Twitter page. This is the same principle that can be found from the “Don’t let people see your Facebook wall!” post.

• Make every follower you get count. Don’t get followers just for the sake of getting followers. Get followers that can benefit you. This could include industry peers, customers or some other specific niche audience.

• Use a profile photo. People relate better with humans than they do with inanimate objects and logos. Do you want to relate well with your audience? Use a human face for your avatar.

• Use Twellow to find your target audience. Twellow is the “yellow pages” of Twitter.

• A word of warning, don’t become follow happy. If you follow too many people too quickly your account could become suspended. You are thought to be spamming “If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;” by Twitter.com.

• How not to get suspended – The Twitter Rules

• Putting a Twitter feed on your website can help with your website search engine optimization.

• Here’s a link to get a twitter widget

• Here’s a video about Twitter and website SEO

I hope these tips help you  as you develop your Twitter presence.

Good luck with your tweeting and on Friday I’ll explain the importance of custom selecting your social media followers and fans.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Schedule Your Tweets in Advance

It’s important to tweet relevant information as much as possible, but sometimes it is hard to find the time to login to Twitter and type your tweets. You can overcome this problem by typing and scheduling all the tweets you want at your convenience. This can be done by going through a website called Hootsuite. The following is an explanation of how to set up Hootsuite and schedule your tweets:

1. Go to Hootsuite.com
2. Click on Sign up now
3. Select Basic free (Unless you want to purchase a different plan)
4. Fill in some basic account info.
5. Click Create
6. Select your style
7. Allow Hootsuite to connect to your Twitter account.

After connecting with Twitter you will be directed to the settings window. If you wish to explore this page you may but it’s not necessary at this point.

After closing this window you will see an owl in the upper left corner of the site. Beside that owl is a text box. Type your message in the box.

If you wish to add a link to your text you can make a shorter URL by pasting the original URL in the shrink box and clicking shrink. This will give you more characters to use for your tweet. [You are limited to 140 characters per tweet]

Now, click on the calendar icon between the shrink and send now buttons. You can select your date and time and then click okay.

Make sure your Twitter profile picture on the right of the text box is selected and click schedule.

Congratulations! You have finished setting up your Hootsuite account and can now type and schedule all the tweets you want at your convenience.

I hope this helps you as your business launches into the realm of tweets.

I look forward to sharing with you again next Wednesday.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Tweet Content: What Your Business Should be Tweeting

You want to have great content that will make your appear to be an expert in your field and will also be of great interest to your readers. First I’m going to give you some tips on getting great content to share. Then I will explain how to make your tweets benefit you.

One tweet should include a tip that could benefit your customers.

Example – If I’m in the signage industry I would tweet that “You should avoid pressure washing your car if it has vinyl lettering on the side.”

One tweet should include a quote that would be of interest to your reader.

Almost everyone in my target audience is employed. Therefore I use quotes that involve work. The quote will have to be short enough to include both the name of the author and the quote itself.

One tweet should be a link to an article or video.

This could be a link to a relevant article or maybe a video. It should lead the reader to something interesting to read or watch.

One tweet should lead your reader to an interesting fact.

If you’re in the movie industry you might tweet that “Today is Brad Pitts’ birthday.”

These tweets are of course not set in stone. It’s rather challenging to find a ton of interesting facts for the signage industry. It may be much easier and just as interesting to tweet a link to the “Pic of the Day.” (Photos of the best or funniest signs made)

Spend a few hours at the beginning of each month and select tips, quotes, articles/videos, facts and/or something else of interest.

Now that you have selected your tweets you can sit back and just post them each day.

Every now and then you will see something interesting that you think could be a good tweet. Feel free to go to Twitter and tweet it. It never hurts to share good information. Just don’t try so hard to post something that you start posting junk. Don’t post stupid content just for the sake of posting something.

How to make your tweets benefit you:

You want to make sure that every tweet has you business name and a keyword that you want to be associated with. This is key!

For example: “Signage Company Name: Vinyl lettering: Vehicle wrap tip: You should avoid pressure washing your car if it has vinyl lettering.”

Personally I don’t care about the tip. I care that my name is in the tweet along with keywords. (Vinyl lettering and Vehicle wrap) The reason for the tip is to get my audience to retweet my name next to some keywords. This is what Google is looking for. It wants to see that people are interested in what I have to say.

I hope this helps you feel more comfortable with what to tweet and I hope it helps you with your Google rankings.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

How Many Times Should I Tweet Each Day?

Yes, Twitter is valuable because it can make your Google ranking go up, but how often should you tweet?

I would recommend tweeting four times each day. You may tweet more if you have enough content to do so.

I would suggest breaking your tweets down by times of the day.

• First tweet should be in the early morning – The new day in the US begins in the Eastern Time zone. There are a lot of people in New England and I want them to read my tweet when they start their day.
• Second tweet should be before lunch – People get a break for lunch and check their Twitter. I want them to see what I have to say during lunch.
• Third tweet should be shortly before people get off work – Many of the people in your audience will check their Twitter/e-mail before getting off work. For this reason it is good to have your tweet waiting for them before they get off work.
• The fourth tweet should be around dinner time – People are home and checking their Twitter. They can now read what you have to say in the comfort of their own home.

If you want to tweet more you can but make sure you have content WORTH tweeting. Nobody will give a glance to your tweets if they know you are going to waste their time.

Question & Answer Time!

• Q: What type of content do you tweet?
• A: I’ll tell you on Friday.
• Q: How do you find the time to tweet so often during the day and what if you are too busy to tweet during those times?
• A: I will tell you on Monday.

I’m really looking forward to sharing the next two blogs with you.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Which Social Media Outlets to Use for Business?

There are so many different social media platforms to use. How do you decide on which one(s) you want?

When you are working on developing a social media presence you want to focus on three key aspects of communication. These aspects are visual, informational and conversational. Ideally you will make use of all three of these types of communication.

The following is a list the social media platforms that I came up with in a brainstorming session. I will indicate why I am or am not planning to use them for the signage business I work for.

YouTube – Yes

YouTube falls under the category of visual. Like a said, you need to show visual imagery. This is good because it allows people to see a face to your organization. They feel as though you are more personable. On the same note, that is why you want to use a profile photo for your avatars and not a logo. People don’t connect to logos, but they do connect and build a rapport with people. I will also use YouTube because it allows me to explain how to make signs and how to care for them. I can show funny sign videos. I can use it as a tool to connect with my audience.

WordPress – Yes

Conversational communication is important. You always want two-way communication. If you are lacking this you can talk till your blue in the face [or fingers from typing] and never communicate once. Feedback allows you to know that you are getting somewhere. You can customize your communication to fit the needs of your audience. If you don’t know what your audience is thinking, and they aren’t communication with you, then you are probably not saying what they need to know. Establish two-way communication through a blog like WordPress and get to know the heart of your target audience.

Twitter – Yes

Twitter is HEAVILY used for search engine optimization (SEO) which I will talk about in more detail later. For know I will just tell you that it is very important to do two things with twitter. 1. use keywords that relate to your business in your tweets. 2. try to give relevant information in your tweets so that people are interested in what you have to say. You want people to read your tweets and share them with others. If you always tweet useless information you will be looked upon as a waste of time and nobody will ever read your tweets.

Hootsuite – Yes

I will talk about this more later. Hootsuite is extremely useful for organizing your tweets on twitter and for monitoring what people say about you.

Pingfm – No

Pingfm is a lot like Hootsuite but in my opinion it is not quite as good. There is no point in having two Hootsuites.

FourSquare – No

For my business this is not a very relevant tool. If you are in the type of business that caters to frequent visitors, such as a restaurant, amusement park or something of that nature I would highly recommend looking into FourSquare.

Facebook – Yes

This is perhaps the most important platform when it comes to informative communication. Facebook allows you to make use of video, blogs, photos and just about any other type of communication method that you can imagine. Also, if Facebook were the size of a country it would be the third largest country in the world. http://tinyurl.com/22ofvb5 Facebook has more than 500 million users and is used around the world. If you want to communicate with your audience you need to find where they are. They are most likely on Facebook, so don’t be left behind.

MySpace – No

Facebook is very useful but for my business it is not. The signage industry caters more to the business world with customers having graduated from college. Facebook’s median age is in the 30’s. MySpace is focused more on the younger demographic. This would be more for teenagers. We don’t generally have too many teenagers buying signs in Pensacola, Fla. If your industry has a strong teenage presence I would highly recommend getting involved with MySpace.

Let me leave you with one note to summarize this posting. You want to communicate visually, informativly and conversationally. Also, you want to find your key target audiences and make sure you are communicating to them. Don’t worry about everyone else. You want a rifle approach and not a shotgun approach. Get your key audience.

Thanks for reading and I hope this was helpful.

If you have found another platform that you think should be included please leave a comment.

I’ll talk to you again next week,

~Joshua Lyons

Don’t Let People See Your Wall! (For fan pages)

If you were interviewing for a job would you prefer the interviewer to ask all of the people you know about you, or would you prefer that he ask you directly? Of course you want the interviewer to ask you directly. This is because you want to give him/her a positive first impression. Not that the people who know you would say bad things per se, but you don’t want to risk anything. You want to be sure that you will provide a positive first impression.

This situation is virtually the same with a Facebook fan page for a business. Why would you want potential clients looking at your muddied wall? Sure, you may have great content on the wall, but the first impression a guest gets should be controlled. It should be a perception of you that you want the visitor to have. Now, after they have seen your customized welcome page and gotten a first impression, they can certainly look at your wall. Just make sure that you create a quality welcome page that can help form a positive first impression about your business. Don’t leave that job to the wall which can be tainted by “friends.”

My next posting will talk more about how to set a custom page.

Thanks for reading,

~ Joshua Lyons

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Hello world!

Hello to you all,

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and social media in general – What is it and how can it benefit your business?

I don’t know you yet but I hope that with time and with relevant blog posts you will get to know me. Also, as you provide comments I should get to know you.

So, who am I and what is Social Mediaing Blog about?

To answer the first question, my name is Joshua Lyons. I graduated from the University of West Florida in December of ’09. I graduated with a BA in Public Relations. I work as the social media director for a signage company called Pensacola Sign and Graphics, Inc. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I have a dog named cookie and my wife’s name is Stacy.

To answer the second question:

I’m 24 years old and as I gain experience in my career I learn many aspects to social media. Why would I be hog all this great information to myself? Well, that wouldn’t be very kind. So, as I learn new information I will feed you the good stuff.

If you are building a social media campaign for your business just follow me and I will help guide you down the social media path that I am traveling.

To the right of the posting you will see links to my other posts. Feel free to read them and leave comments.

I look forward to getting to know you,

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

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