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30 Working Calls to Action for Your Social Media Site is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

In reality, taking this sort of half-hearted approach to a social media campaign can do more harm than good for your blog, site or company. If you want your social media efforts to create an actual return on your time and money investment, you’d better practice sound planning and consistent, targeted implementation. Otherwise, you could be in for a whole host of troubles.

Why Google Hates Bad Social Media Campaigns

No matter how big or small, your social media campaign probably has one singular goal: getting more attention and publicity for your website or business, chiefly through obtaining a higher search engine results ranking on Google. If you were to simply read the title of this post and assume that the takeaway with respect to social media campaigns is “more is better,” you’d be sorely mistaken.

In many ways, “half-assing” your social media efforts is more akin to doing too much, not too little. This is because Google absolutely hates it when a site engages in an excess of aggressive, blatant self-promotion. So much, in fact, that such a practice can lead directly to your site being blacklisted by Google. This equates to a severe downranking of your site, pushing it deep into search results and subsequently squashing your traffic numbers.

Why does Google punish overzealous promotion? It’s simple: Google is a company too, with its own investors, principles and thousands of employees. In order to improve their business, they want to create the best possible experience for their users, which means helping them find the most authoritative, relevant sites as quickly as possible. Your site screaming “look at me!” through a blanket, over-the-top social media campaign without enough valuable, relevant content to back it up comes off as forced and obvious, and Google sends you to the depths of their search results as punishment.

How Much is Too Much When it Comes to Social Media Efforts?

A number of factors play into this subjective question, ranging from your niche to your competition to the specific social media sites upon which you base your campaign. However, there are a few definite no-no’s that you should generally avoid with all of your social media efforts, regardless of whether you’re running a giant wireless internet service or a tiny blog about your love of pets:

• Creating multiple profiles on one social media site and linking all of them to your site(s)
• Having virtually no followers or friends but tons of links to your site(s)
• Exclusively bookmarking pages that link to your site(s)
• Using a software program to automate the posting of backlinks to multiple social media sites
• Virtually anything else that could be classified as spam, or that doesn’t provide any real value to the user while promoting your own site(s)

Basically, you can differentiate between a “good” social media move and a “bad” one by asking yourself, “would I do this even if I didn’t own a website, but rather if I was just a fan of this website?” If you see your actions as clear self promotion, odds are good that Google will too.

Another Pitfall: A Big Bang Followed by a Lot of Fizzle

Another danger of a poorly implemented social media campaign is the likelihood that a company will jump into social networking head-first, with much fanfare, only to fizzle out shortly after, lacking the resources, desire or motivation necessary to maintain that same initial pace.

You see this type of activity everywhere on social media sites: a company will launch a page on Facebook, talking about all of its awesome new features and inviting the community to leave feedback, interact and generally join in the festivities. A couple of months or even a few weeks later, the page is a barren wasteland with little to no new content updates and a few remaining users wondering why their questions and concerns are going unanswered.

Why does this happen? Probably because the site owner, or whoever she has running the site’s social media campaign, bit off more than she could chew when starting her social media efforts. Spreading yourself too thin and going for quantity instead of quality in a social media campaign is a perfect way to tank your site.

Social networking site users expect interaction, and lots of it. They understand that a large blog or site won’t have the resources to answer every single comment, but they won’t stick around for very long if they realize that they’re engaged in a totally one-directional conversation. For this reason, you need to devote as much time as is necessary to every branch of your social media campaign, following up on the promises you make and actually remaining active in the overall discussion long after you launch a social media page.

About the Author: Mitch O’Conner is an online marketer and writer. When he’s not busy testing sites, generating traffic or writing content, he enjoys spending time with his wife and kids, watching TV, playing games or going camping.

Image credit Andrew-Hyde

The Dangers of Half-Assing Your Social Media Efforts is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

The world of social media marketing has exploded. Before we focused heavily on our SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts. But Google realised it was necessary for them to create a more unique search results and integrate social media content, interactions, and the trends of social world to the search results they produce. Considering they dominate search, Google has managed to be pretty fair about the way they have been delivering search results. So now, social media plays a big part of our online marketing strategies, and having that content managed, and well written is extremely important.

Without trying to create many fancy strategic claims or plans, here are the essentials of writing for social media, from someone who has been in the business of writing, translation, localisation, media, online marketing, TV advertising, billboard advertising, subway and limited-time-terminal advertising (i.e. plasma screens in a taxi, subway train or bus) for 20 years.

Research

There is nothing like detailed research to know you audience. What mobile phones do they prefer, what shoes do they wear on Friday nights, how much would they spend on a gift for their partner if they just won 1000 dollars on a 2 dollar lottery ticket. Every little detail collected is more information. Data is alone not enough. Quantifying and qualifying our data is essential. The old saying applies – we cannot compare apples and oranges.

Write For Your Reader

In translation this is simply known as target language. In localisation it is known as target audience. The same rules apply. If you are talking to your audience of 13-18 year old females, writing for them is essential. This is not to say that it should be a female of that age (or a little older) who will be better at this, but there are some fundamentals about understanding the audience we cannot ignore. This is the case for all segments, audiences, and markets.

Write for the Medium

Just like in all media, we need to write for the medium. Nike will have different adverts in their business newspaper advertising when compared with the advertising they will place in a male orientated lifestyle and entertainment magazine, say, FHM, for example. The same goes with social media marketing. Facebook is a medium, linked in is another medium, and each site and network will have its own suitability.

Personality

Personality is your brand with words. You cannot compromise your brand or you will confuse your target audience. You can change your tone for your segments, but compromising your personality is destruction of your brand. Brand is everything. Brand is your company’s image, emotional association and ‘experience’ for your viewer.

Getting Feedback

Communication is nothing without feedback. Feedback is the key to social media marketing, and key to dealing with your people. Now more than ever, they can complain, and they can complain to a lot of people very fast, and very loud. Not all companies are dealing with this well. You must respond to complaints. Consumers have further options such as taking you to Fair Trading commissions and Consumer Affairs, and that will be out there for all to see. People listen to their friends. Your brand and company can be trashed before you know it from one poorly treated customer

SEO (search engine optimisation) has really come a long way. We are using these principles in our social media writing and integrating social media content into our SEO. We really do have a lot on our hands.

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Image credit Will

5 Essential Social Media Writing Guides You Must Apply is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Just because we have switched to an explosive world of online marketing, social media marketing, Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing and more, it does not mean our traditional values of communication should be forgotten. The opposite is the reality, and we should take advantage of that.

If you ever had any doubts about SEO (search engine optimization), this article is for you. By now, you should have heard, Google’s website was the first website to ever have over one billion (US billion) unique visitors in one month (May, 2011). It is not surprising Google’s website was the first site to reach such an astronomical figure. We are all getting online, and then we all use Google to search for what we are looking for. There is definitely no doubt the internet is being used like never before, and by more different kinds of people. Social networking, the foundation for social media marketing has opened the flood gates for a whole range of people getting online, that were not getting online before. Now, more than ever, our traditional communication values count.

Diversity of Users

Social networking has invigorated internet use by changing the nature of online communication. It is no longer online communication in the established sense. Now it is just another way we communicate, and the architectural dynamics available encourage more familiar relationships. The result is a personal and gregarious means of sharing with others. More people from every demographic in every society are getting in touch. The 65+ age group of any society have been known for their resistance towards internet use. In a few short years, with the help of online communication improvements mainly via applications and some device modifications, their internet user numbers are suddenly up by over 20%, and increasing.

Human Styled Online Relationships

In short, more people are getting online because of websites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, eBay, LinkedIn, CNN, Wikipedia, PayPal, FourSquare, Yahoo, and they are communicating live iChat, Skype, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, Aim, and QQ on their desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. This is all allowing for more flexible roaming human-like relationships, and they just make more sense. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be so many older people enjoying Facebook, and there wouldn’t be so many kids on Youtube demonstrating make-up and fashion tips. Google+ would not exist with so many users in such a short amount of time.

Traditional Still Counts

Now more than ever, every business can dramatically increase profits from owning a website, and every business needs to get their website right. No matter what business you are in, there are substantial numbers of your potential clients online. Marketing is still marketing, and for the first time, traditional fundamentals can be re-applied to online activities. We can get back to using traditional marketing concepts, and traditional relationship values to help us better understand how to approach online marketing. We can go as far as to say it is not the numbers and crunching of only a few years ago.

Human Approach

Everything that counts for personal relationship building has become important again. We are not just mass mailing to unknown recipients. We are not pushing out advertorials to push our products. We need to care about our clients. We need to show empathy with our suppliers, and most of all, we need to share that warm and fuzzy feeling.

When we keep these important values in mind, we can build relationships with those around us online. Just because we are not face-to-face with them (and we can do that with video calling too), it does not mean emotions are not attached to our communications. The social arena has brought back our human needs, and human empathy to online communications. We can make this the first rule of any online marketing strategy – perhaps we should call it friendship building instead of marketing.

This is a guest post by Sachin from Webprofits .

Traditional Values Are Valuable to SEO and Online Marketing is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Hosting

Select your hosting provider. I suggest one that is not the cheapest as cheap usually comes from poor service and technical instability. Host your blog on your own domain. This way you’ll be building an asset YOU own, not some service provider.

If you are expecting huge traffic – be prepared, so that you will survive traffic spikes when you are featured on the front page of Yahoo or other top sites. CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Your website’s traffic is routed through CloudFlare’s intelligent global network. It blocks threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers.

WordPress

Use WordPress for blogging. It is an amazing tool, has tons of features, is easy to use and you can find a plugin for almost every need you might have. Most hosting providers have an one click WordPress install option.

Select a free theme that meets your needs. If you are just starting out then that is all you need. This blog has been run on Clean Home theme from day one.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress is great out of the box but you can make it even better! Here is the list of WordPress plugins I use in this site:

@DanZarrella’s Readability Analyzer – Readability Measurement for your Blog. Simple language gets shared more.

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Pretty much all you need to get search engines to love your blog.

Blog Metrics – Provides blog metrics based on the blog metrics Avinash Kaushik proposed in this post.

Cforms – cformsII offers contact forms across your blog. Spam protection, Ajax support, backup and restore, multi-recipients, role manager support, database tracking, etc.

Date Exclusion SEO – Gives your blog a feeling of freshness by turning off the display of date information after a specified number of days or immediately after posting. You also have the option of removing dates from category and tag pages as well as the front page of your blog. We are experimenting with removing the dates from older posts as they still have value but a date two years in the past may change how people perceive it.

Duplicate Post – Creates a copy of a post if you want to post a new item in a series of posts including all the tags and categories.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Get Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

Google Analyticator – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

Qoate Scroll Triggered Box – A scroll triggered box for easy social bookmarks or a newsletter sign-up form. This is the newsletter signup box you see in the bottom right corner of our site when you scroll past 20% mark.

SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.

Share Buttons Simple Use – This is a simple use plugin which displays the share buttons (Facebook Like, Tweet and Google Buzz buttons) on the bottom or on the top of the posts and pages. There are a lot of these plugins around, this is probably one with least options.

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

TinyMCE Valid Elements – Allows one to add “invalid” and custom HTML elements to the TinyMCE editor.

WordPress Gravatars – Makes use of Gravatars and MyBlogLog Avatars, places Gravatars, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or MyBlogLog Avatars in the comments section.

WordPress Hashcash – Client-side javascript blocks all spam bots. There’s a lot of spam around when your blog get popular. I apologize for some of the real comments being marked as spam from time to time.

WP-Table Reloaded – Create and manage tables. Easy manipulation of table data. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.

WPtouch – A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for visitors on iPhone, iPod touch, Android, and other touch-based smartphones.

Permission Marketing

Start collecting your opt-in email list right now! We use GetResponse to communicate with our readers. When you sign up for our newsletter you will receive welcoming emails with links to our best posts and then you will be moved to a regular mailinglist where you get a few emails per month.

Add a Follow button and ask people to follow you on Twitter.

Use Feedburner to track your feed readers.

Add a Facebook like box to your site so that visitor see they are not the first person who visits.

Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that I use every day to find out what people like, where they come from and what actions do they take on our site.

To see the social reactions to your post use PostRank Analytics. It was acquired by Google and will probably be merged int Google Analytics.

Always be testing. The simplest free testing tool for your site is Google Website Optimizer. Find out what works and what does not with Google’s free website testing and optimization tool. Test and optimize site content and design so you can get better results, increase revenue and ROI.

Facebook Insights for Domains offers a consolidated view of key metrics for any website, even those that have not implemented Facebook Platform. For example, if a user links to your site in their Facebook status message, that data is included in the analytics for your domain.

Writing

OpenOffice.org – I suggest you write your posts in an external editor. I feel that this helps me to avoid disasters like loosing the content due to browser crashes and other calamities. Always use spell checker even if you are better writer than me. SAVE after every sentence. If you need to display graphs and charts create them with OpenOffice Calc and then edit with image tools.

In some cases I have started using Google Docs as it saves automatically and enables sharing with other writers. I save post topics and blogging calendar in Google Spreadsheet. You can use Google Spreadsheet for research when you need to create simple surveys.

Images

Every post needs an image. Make it colorful, shocking, interesting, but most importantly make sure it’s about your subject matter. People ignore stock images. Whenever possible select or create images so that they expand the story. I always add image credit at the bottom of the post with a link to original image source.

Flickr Advanced search lets you find images that are licensed under Creative Commons license. You can check: only search within Creative Commons-licensed content, find content to use commercially and find content to modify, adapt, or build upon.

Another great site for free images is Stock.XCHNG. It has a huge gallery of more than 350.000 quality photos by more than 30.000 photographers.

Image Editing

Sometimes you need to change a picture. For simple resizing and image manipulation I use IrfanView. I think it’s one of the best small image applications on PC. It opens almost anything, plays videos and more. Press F12 and a annotation toolbox jumps out so you can draw on the sceenshot to point out elements on the image.

If you need more robust editing tools then the free option is Gimp. With Gimp you can great your own images or modify existing ones.

For simple flow charts and line drawings I use OpenOffice Draw.

Other Tools

Disqus a comments platform that helps you build an active community from your website’s audience. People can use their Facebook, Twitter and other existing accounts to identify themselves. We had some problems getting it to work with this site but I use it on other blogs.

Facebook Comments Box is a social plugin that enables user commenting on your site. Features include moderation tools and distribution. I sleep better when I know that Facebook can’t screw up my comments.

Social networks

If you write it then don’t hold your breath. To get people to your site you need to spread the word. Select the social networking sites, that are most relevant to your audience and post your fresh content there. Facebook and Twitter are probably for everybody. If you are in a B2B sector add LinkedIn. And select the most important social sites for your industry.

This post serves, as a reminder to myself but I hope you get some value out of it. If there is a tool that I haven’t mentioned but you find really useful? Post it in the comments.

Some other blogging related posts:

• 22 Blogging Tips That Will Get You More Visitors
• 20 Steps to Write a Blog Post
• Why Businesses Need to Blog?
• How to Get Your Blog to 30,000+ Visits per Month
  

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Image credit Sergio Ianni

40 Tools I Use for Blogging is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

It is very difficult to create viral ads on purpose, they just happen and setting yourself out to create viral ads as a goal could easily be a missfire. But if your business tries to create meaningful or enjoyable content, people just might like it and share it with their friends.  And that’s the jackpot.

Viral videos Do’s and Don’t-s

• Do make it brief – two minutes at max.
• Don’t fake it. People will find out.
• Do make people remember your video -  make it shocking, amazing, fun, enjoyable, unexpected, etc.
• Don’t make it an obvious advertisment. Selling your product will hardly ever create a viral effect.
• Make it easily shareable.

Viral video marketing: T-Mobile Angry Birds Live case study is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Shakespeare would undoubtedly make a great blogger!

Here are 22 blogging tips that will help you be a better blogger, improve the quality of your posts and get you more readers. If you are in the internet marketing and social media you know that content is king. Creating valuable content is one of the most important tasks of any marketer.

1. Know what you are talking about

It’s hard to write about something that you don’t know. If you write about tea then be a tea expert. If you blog about cars be a car expert. If you are just beginning on the path of becoming an expert then blog about that. Read a lot and write about what you learned. In no time you will be perceived as an expert.

2. Know your audience

It is very important that you know who you are talking with and who you want to reach. For example this post might be more interesting to a marketing practitioner than a C-level executive looking for strategic advice. Use the language and style of the people you are targeting. Be as simple as possible because simpler language gets shared more.

3. Write about important stuff

Solve a problem

What value will the reader get out of your post? Find some itch that needs scratching and write about that. For example people may need to stay current or look for ideas.

Keywords

Look at what keywords are popular in your industry and what problems are related to those topics. Sort the keyword list in descending order and start writing. Top 10 ideas about [keyword], best [keyword] tools, Best books about [keyword], etc.

Surf the forums and Q&A sites

Find the important forums in your industry and scan them for problems that do not have answers or you can provide a better solution. For example you can scan Yahoo Answers and answer a question or two in depth every week. Post the short answer next to the original question and link back to your post. Be careful to add value to the conversation or some admins might consider this as spam.

What are others writing about

Read other blogs in your field. What are the important issues? Can you identify a rising trend and boost your visitor numbers that way? Maybe some industry expert writes about something that you think is wrong, take an opposing view and let everybody know.

4. Set the goal for your post

Is this going to be everlasting post that people ca read in three years and still consider it valuable? Or are you breaking some important industry news? Or a regular post that solves an existing problem for some of your customers? Use the resources according to the goal. Spend lot of time and effort for the important stuff and reasonable constraints on regular posts.

5. Be different

Do you add some value with your post? Is there something new and previously unknown in your post. What is your unique angle? One good way to get a new perspective is to look at it from your targets point of view. For example changing a flat tire for women.

6. Great headlines

We wrote about great headlines here 9 Simple Formulas to Create Killer Headlines. Most people read the headline and decide if the want to know more. Work with the headlines and this will make a huge difference in your readership and shareability. Learn from tabloids how to reel people in.

7. Start with the lead

Start with one or two sentences that will tell your reader what they are going to get out of the post. We don’t have much time and we want to know immediately if this is something that in need to read. You may have a great post but if the essence of the post is at the end then many people just may not reach it.

8. Keep it short & simple

Readers scan the post with their eyes and decide if it’s worth reading. If it’s a big piece of block text then only your most devoted fans will read it. Keep everything short and simple. Simple words. Short sentences. Short paragraphs. If you have to much material, maybe it’s a good idea to break the post into a series of posts.

9. Make it easy to read

People don’t read web pages they scan. Make it easier for them to scan pages. Use large font, I would say that 12 pixels is absolute minimum text size for the website. Dark text on light background. Bold text or bullet points for important items. New paragraphs every 4-5 lines, one idea per paragraph.

10. End with the call to action

At the end of the post ask people to share it with their friends of give feedback in the comments. If you are writing about your products and services then make an offer. Ask them to sign up to your newsletter or follow on Twitter. If you ask them to do something more people will do it.

11. Use their language

Use the language that your readers are using. You may have specific industry terms you use with your colleagues and nobody else understands. Don’t use that! If you are a web developer don’t tel your readers about php, Ruby, SQL, XSS, HTML5 or JQuery. Tell them what it does and what benefit will they get out of it. Many people fail at this step, let your non-specialist friend read the post and tell you if they understood what you had to say. Write so your grandmother would understand.

12. Use pictures and captions

Pictures help you r post to stand out when shared on social media channels. People like images, they are easy to consume. Do not use unrelated images about happy people with laptops. There has to be a connection between the post and the image. If the connection is not clear, make it clear with the caption.

13. Emotions

Let your reader feel empowered, happy, smart! I suggest you go with the positive emotions but you can get results with FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Let them understand that you understand and they will love you.

14. Show yourself

Identify who you are and what you do. Make your blog template display short info about the author. People want tho know who’s behind the post and this will help you to identify yourself as their peer. As one of my friend said I don’t care what they print about me as long as the name and the image are correct. Admittedly, the dog ate the “author section” of this blog.

15. Link to sources

Link to sources. Where did you get that image, who else is writing about this, have you covered this topic before. For example the original of this post was written by Annes Org for our Estonian blog. We use creative commons images in most of our posts and link to the source. This way you will get more credible and your readers will get an alternative view. And don’t worry about linking out as Outbound Links are Gold.

16. Be consistent

You can write once every week or twice a month but keep that schedule. I believe that to achieve real results you need to blog several times per week but consistency is important. Your readers will get used to the regular posting cycle. If you leave big gaps in your blogging activity readers will leave and they seldom come back. If you are not one man band then ask your colleagues to write, too. It helps even if it’s once or twice per month.

17. Optimize for search engines

Use your important keywords in your post’s title, address and heading. These three are the most important elements. Write a description. Link to related posts with keyword rich text links. Add tags and categories. Use keywords in image file names and alt tags.

18. Set goals and measure

If you want to get somewhere you have to measure if you are moving in the right direction. It it said that people with clear goals have more success than the ones without. Write down what are you trying to accomplish. For example per month goals might be:

• Leads
• Revenue from web
• Comments
• Newsletter signups
• Visits
• Facebook likes
• Twitter followers

You can read more about what to measure here: 48 Social Media KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

19. Don’t over do it!

If you are empty, leave it at that and come back later. Take a break, do something else and then come back to write.

20. Check and double check

Always check if everything is working. All the links are pointing to the right place. The signup form actually signs up. SEO elements are in place, categories and tags are set. We have a separate check list to make sure that you don’t miss anything: 20 Steps to Write a Blog Post.

One great idea to write better posts is to write the post and then come back to it after 24 hours. You will make your post better every time. Guaranteed!

21. Practice make perfect

It sometimes doesn’t feel like that but… The more you write the better you will get.

22. Passion

Write about thing s you really care about. If you don’t care about given topic find a new one.

I hope this post will help you to be a better blogger. If you know anyone who might benefit from this post then please share it with friends on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

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Image credit Lincolnian (Brian) – BUSY

22 Blogging Tips That Will Get You More Visitors is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Steps to blogging heaven!

I see time and again that when people are posting on their blogs some steps are omitted. This post is about the steps you need to take to get maximum coverage in social channels and search engines.

Desktop Text Editor

I use a desktop text editor such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer to write my posts. The reason for this is that I have had a online tools crash on me losing all the work. Right now I think the safest way is to write offline and save often. Here’s what you need to do:

• Write the post.
• Create a keyword rich title. The keywords in the title are great fodder for search engine spiders.
• Select categories under which you file the post. I put most posts into several categories.
• Select a dozen important keywords from the post that will become the tags for this post.
• Write a description of the post. Up to 160 characters that tell people why they should read this post. Google uses this as a search result snippet.
• Select images that illustrate the subject matter. Give credit to the authors of the images. Good sources for images are sxc.hu and Flickr advanced search creative commons.

WordPress

I use WordPress as the blogging platform. But most major providers should have the features described here. At this point all the editing should be done and you will just copy and paste the content into your blog.

• Enter the title and save the draft. This way you will make sure that the web address of the post will be the same as post title. You may edit the URL to make it shorter and increase keyword density.
• Copy the body text of the post and format as needed. Make important passages bold and use sub headings as needed.
• Add the pictures.
• Set the categories.
• Add the tags.
• Copy and paste the description of the post.
• Set the time for publication. Experiment to find out what is the best time to publish your blog posts. (Read: When to Tweet, Email, and Post on Facebook?)
• Click publish or schedule.

Spreading the Word

It’s not enough to just publish your post. You have to take the post to readers door step and this means knowing the channels where they hang out.

• First share it on your Facebook page. Add a short description what’s it about. This way your post will not seem as an automated feed. Click like.
• Write a tweet and post the link to Twitter.
• Add the post to appropriate LinkedIn groups.
• In important forums and Q&A sites find if the post answers existing questions. Write the short and to the point answer and add a link to your post for more detail. Make sure you are on topic.
• Ask your friends and colleagues to share, retweet, like and comment the post in channels they feel comfortable with. This creates initial social confirmation that other people actually like the post.

Engaging

Download the checklist as a PDF file.

• Answer all comments to keep the conversations going.
• Comment on the blogs that are linking to your post. Thank them and try to add something to the original post.

These steps won’t make anybody a better writer but you will get more out of what you write. These steps may create a dramatic difference in traffic and engagement.  So, if you are spending hours agonizing over th blog posts then take the extra 15 minutes to get the most out of them. I originally wrote this post as a checklist for a client. Print the bullet points out and check them off as you publish your posts.

Always SAVE!

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Image credit Romain Ballez

20 Steps to Write a Blog Post is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Search and Social: How to Get More Action from Organic Marketing

What impact do real-time search results have on brand awareness and consideration? And how do you leverage social engagement to increase SEO? Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz, provides answers to these questions as he shares secrets about real-time search an the impact it can have on social media engagement.

About to lose control

Marketeers are about to lose control. Luckily, this is a good thing. By stepping out of the way, they can become a facilitator between their employees and their customers. This puts the CMO in the role of CCO: Chief Customer Officer. Employee brandbuilding is a simple and practical approach to start this new role.

Social Media ROI: Whats the Fuss?

This deck was used in a panel discussion at the India Social Summit (ISS10) on Dec 17. It has: view on ROI, case studies, pointers on how to get started.

101 Marketing Charts and Graphs

Over 50 marketing charts and graphs based on original research and data from a variety of sources, including analysis of our 2,500 business customers, surveys with hundreds of businesses responding, analysis of the data in our free tools like Website Grader, Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader.

Innovation is the true ROI of social media

Slides for Marketing Foundation Congress 2010. Topic: Innovation is the true ROI of social media. Or how to get customers & influence people with social media.

In Brand We Trust: How Social Media Fits Into It All

A great initial step into the right paths for your company to address both brand positioning and social media. This one is a light introduction to the subject. If you want to get real heavy into the nuts and bolts of social media, we’ve got another one with your name on it. Just ask.

10 Event Trends for 2011

What will be the trends in social media and technology influencing event planners? It looks like it will be more social, mobile and tech.

Social Recruiting @ Deloitte

The Future of Social Commerce

Skive’s overview of social commerce.

7 Top Social Game Metrics for 2011 – The A.R.M Metrics Framework

The A.R.M Metrics Framework: Top 7 Social Metrics presented with the lifecycle of an application: Acquisition of Users, User Retention and Monetization of User.

The future of advertising isn’t advertising

Talk by William Owen, co-founder Made by Many, for APA International Content Summit 2010, London, 24 November, as part of a panel entitled ’The future of advertising: is the traditional model dead?’.

The Adaptive Cycle In Social Systems

Future of Digital Engagement

Presentation given to 7-Eleven on 18th November around the Future of Digital Engagement. Presented in conjunction with Leo Burnett Melbourne. Covers four key areas: Australian online behaviour, game changers (Google, Apple and Social Networks), key take outs (summary).

Social Media For Business: 31 Stats and Anecdotes

31 stats and anecdotes to help make the case for Social Media investment in your organization. Highlights from numerous 3rd Party reports and studies that show the rapid adoption of Social Media Marketing for businesses. Includes a compilation of spending projections, penetration estimates, survey data, and specific examples cover all types of businesses. Because 20 Decibels currently focuses on Twitter, these may have a slight bend to Twitter for Business, but cover the general trends in Social Media as well. For links to sources, visit our blog.

Global Social Media Checkup

The Global Social Media Check-Up examined how the Global Fortune 100 are using popular social media platforms to communicate with their stakeholders. The data for this study was collected between November 2009 and January 2010 among the top 100 companies of the 2009 Fortune Global 500 companies. Sample size for countries/regions: U.S. = 29 companies, Europe = 48 companies, Asia-Pacific = 20 companies, Latin America = 3 companies. Because of the low sample size for Latin America, data is only broken out for this region for overall activity rates. “Active” accounts have at least one post in the past 3 months. Outliers have been noted. Data was collected by Burson-Marsteller’s global research team.

17 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2011

As a bonus here’s our own social media trends prediction presentation. I hope you like it, you can find the full post here.

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Image credit: mr.throk

15 Great Social Media and Marketing Presentations is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Set Goals is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media