What Is Changing With Social Media In 2013?

Facebook has now reached 1 billion users and other Social Media sites are thriving. How can we use this as an advantage to creating customers?

1. With so many choices, how will we continue to use all of these media outlets? Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Foursquare and Tumblr are the top 9 sites you need to be on right now with complete profiles and solid, interesting compelling content. You can post to many of these sites using aggregators like HooteSuite or SocialOomph.

2. Who will be around in 5 years, and who will fade! Top 5 listed above will be around, others may fade and new ones will arrive.

3. How to create engaging content? Quality fun photos, creative videos, well written blogs, articles and press releases.

4. What processes can we take to make the most out of our social media campaigns? Hire someone to manage this for you or if doing it yourself, plan on 15 to 20 hours per week. Create and control your online brand, build a massive targeted following and tie it into a search marketing campaign. Build a list and create a relationship to the list with email or video sales funnels.

5. What's the future hold for SEO? Search Engine Optimization is not going away but I feel it has lost some of its importance. Social Media Sites, Articles, Videos and Blogs are getting ranked on Page One of Google faster and staying longer.

6. How are the big players controlling the way we use social media? The big players, meaning Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn? They are all doing their best to make the user experience better while including a way for businesses to reach new customers.

7. Community meets entertainment, what's the future hold for our online experience? Online experience will become more like television. More videos will be watched, added to websites, Social Media sites and blog platforms. More videos will be watch on smart phones and tablets. Vlogging is hot right now.

8. How being connected opens your influential reach? Love this question. Brand yourself as a leader by creating excellent content and building a massive following. You don't need to be a rockstar, athlete, actor/actress and politician to be famous anymore. Create your own industry/niche network.

9. What are some of the biggest misconceptions? That it's easy and a teenager can do it. Social Media and Internet Marketing MUST become part of your monthly marketing budget.

10. How to distinguish ourselves in Social Media, is it for friends, is it for business, what impressions do we create online? Brand yourself as a leader and expert in your industry. Then build a massive following and email list. If this is done correctly, you will attract your clients to you. Selling will be easy.

Finding fame, and sometimes fortune, in social media

Those who have become 'internet-famous' offer insights to the use of Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr for self-promotion.

Social media has made it easier than ever to catapult from obscurity to prominence. In recent years, the web has blossomed into a more egalitarian version of American Idol, where nobodies compete for attention alongside somebodies.
Today, a teenager posting webcam videos to YouTube can get a movie deal. (For example, Fred: The Movie.)
A 30-something posting one-liners on Twitter can land a TV show on CBS: $#*! My Dad Says. Bloggers creating internet memes are being offered book deals at a dizzying pace.

However, alongside breakout web celebs — not to mention actual celebrities with huge online followings such as Rihanna and Katy Perry — there's a new class of microstars who are highly popular and viral, but have no aspirations of going to Hollywood.

 How they became internet-famous — and made comfortable incomes — offers insights to those who are unsure of how to use Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr to promote themselves or their projects.

The mobile phone quipster

Tattoo photos and stories posted by Kimber Turner on Tumblr.

Like many teenagers, Joey Mueller, 19, spends much of his time texting on his iPhone. But when he taps out a 140-character message and presses send, he's talking to nearly 400,000 people.
Mueller created his Twitter account, @itisjoey, in 2010 as he was travelling to compete at the World Horseshoe Tournament in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He figured using Twitter to comment from a big event might help him draw an audience.
"I didn't get any followers or anything," he recalls. "I guess it wasn't interesting."

Joey Mueller, aka @itisjoey. Photo: Twitter

Now a sophomore majoring in graphic design at the University of Minnesota, he decided to avoid personal messages and focus on observational humour.
Mueller says his personal Tumblr website already had 75,000 followers. He added a link to his Twitter account. Immediately, his follower count jumped. Then a curious thing happened: the numbers kept climbing. In 2012, he hit 440,000.
I'm not sure why," he says. "Sometimes I think I got lucky."
Mueller says he has never purchased followers. He says that posting from noon to 6pm, when people typically spend more time online, helps. He also routinely adopts popular hashtags, especially political ones, which he says helped get him retweeted by organisations including Move On.
The fame hasn't gone to his head, he says, or at least his parents keep him down-to-earth. "They're like, 'You know, you're not really famous. Stay in school."'

The tattoo chronicles
Kimber Turner was bored. In the spring of 2008, when she was a 22-year-old journalism major at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Turner completed all of her courses online. Which is to say, she spent a lot of time on her laptop.
Turner started killing time online by collecting found images of tattoos borrowed mostly from body modification websites. She decided to post the photos on a Tumblr account she hastily titled with an obscenity common among youthful creators of Tumblrs — personalised web pages where ephemera is deposited. In a few months, Turner had 300 followers. Other Tumblr users began emailing pictures and explanations of their own tattoos to her.
"Everybody wanted their story out there," Turner says. "People just really liked how interactive it was."
She said in 2008 she received 200 submissions a day. Four years later, she gets 350 a day. Images are contributed by fans all over the globe.
Today, Turner has more than 695,000 followers. For comparison, when Texts from Hillary went viral on Tumblr earlier this year, it attracted 45,000 followers in a week.
Her secret? Volume. She publishes about 50 photos a day, one every 30 minutes, to keep fans coming back. She also follows Tumblr's other popular users
"There's so many people on Tumblr who post all sorts of random things," Turner says. "Having a focus really lets people connect, and it's a great way to stand out."
Although she took various odd jobs after graduating in 2011, including one as a receptionist for a seamstress, ads on the site earn her $60,000 annually, she says.
"When I realised it could very well just be a full-time job, I nearly had a heart attack," she says. "Now I make more than my parents."

The hyperlocal radio DJ
Jaime Black, 29, says he has been a "huge radio nerd" since he was 15. He cut his teeth at an alternative rock station, Q101 in Chicago, where he graduated from an internship to a weekend producing job.
On the side, in 2005, he began podcasts about Chicago's underground music scene. Called Dynasty Podcasts, the episodes — 10 to 15-minute interviews Black records with local artists and club owners — were made available as MP3s on his website. The response was modest.
Five years later, when he created a SoundCloud account, he saw just how broad his reach could grow. He has amassed more than 43,000 followers on the audio-sharing website, which has been called the "YouTube of audio".
"I was very fortunate to get there early," Black says of SoundCloud, which claims to have 20 million users. "I might have beat some of the larger radio stations to SoundCloud. I didn't see that much non-music content when I started."
Today, Black posts two to 11 shows a week, which he records with a hand-held Olympus digital recorder. His philosophy is, "make it easy for people to discover the content and know right away what it is".
"I'm sharing it on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest," he says. "I don't just post things without putting some effort into the presentation. All the imaging is uniform. All the metadata is uniform."
In 2011, Black started running local event promotions, just like a radio station. He turned Dynasty Podcasts into a full-time job and said he earned $500 for one hour of work.
"A few years ago it was like, 'Oh, how cute, you have a pretend radio show,' " Black says. "And now, we just did a promotion with Supercuts."

The metropolitan paparazzo
Whenever a new digital service is started, there is a race to claim user names. In January 2011, Liz Eswein, then a senior at New York University, claimed one of the better Instagram user names: @newyorkcity.
"People have said, 'Oh, I thought the city of New York was running it.' " Eswein laughs. "It's like, nope, it's just me."
It is difficult to tell that the feed is not maintained by someone in the mayor's office. Eswein, 23, posts only photos taken in and around the city. Using her iPhone 4S, she sticks to snapshots of familiar landmarks like the Statue of Liberty and Central Park, and pictures taken at local events such as the US Open and New York Fashion Week. One of Eswein's recent snapshots of the Plaza Hotel earned 13,330 likes.
She says she often sees comments from users across the United States and as distant as Australia, South America and Greece.
"Instagram is a great way to see different parts of the world through your phone," she says, "Everyone has a special place in their heart for New York City."
Soon after starting the account, Eswein began attending local Instawalks, where users gather to socialise and take photos. The gatherings publicised her account among the app's power users.
By April 2012, @newyorkcity had 195,000 followers. It jumped to 422,000 after the release of an Instagram app for Android phones. (For some perspective, Lady Gaga's account currently has about 440,000 followers.)
In March, Eswein founded a business with two Instagram users. They now consult with brands, including Evian and Samsung, that are looking to engage users on Instagram.
Does she also keep a personal account on Instagram? "Yeah, but I don't use it at all," she said.

7 Social Media Strategies for Small Business Owners

Investing in free social media tools is one of the most cost-effective things a small business owner can do to increase brand recognition and awareness, and yet fewer than 20% of SMBs currently have websites that link to popular social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Why the disconnect? A 2011 survey by Hiscox, a small business insurance agency, found that 24% of SMB owners say they don’t have time to participate in social media marketing, while 14% say they don’t even know where to begin. Here are seven tips from experts in the social media marketing industry about how business owners can take advantage of the social media tools available today.1. Start measuring immediately. It’s important for small businesses to know how they’re doing when it comes to social media — including which tweets are getting the most re-tweets, which Facebook posts are getting the most ‘likes’, and which Tumblr posts are getting the most reblogs. By choosing some metrics that are important and keeping track of those measurements early on, businesses can generate benchmarks that they can look back at to see how they’re faring over time.

2. Timing is everything. When it comes to social media strategy, business owners should make sure they are tapping into the right channels during the optimal time of day. For example, restaurants may benefit from tweeting specials during lunchtime. The best days to send messages are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, since Monday is a catch-up day and Friday is too close to the weekend. Also, businesses will get the most traffic by scheduling their messages according to Eastern Standard Time.

3. Use the right platforms. Each social media site has its own particular quirks, and the messages that work on one site won’t necessary work on another. Photos are great on Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram, but they don’t have the same impact when posted on Twitter. Business owners should experiment to learn which types of content work best on which platforms, and then do more of whatever produces the greatest results.

4. Treat social media as a two-way street. Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter aren’t just a one-way street. Business owners should ideally be writing posts and responding to customers regularly, both as a way to keep customers engaged and to promote social sharing. Industry estimates show that most people have an average of 250 friends on Facebook. Businesses can tap into that network for free when they engage customers in conversations about their products online.

5. Offer exclusive deals and discounts. One of the main reasons why customers follow their favorite brands online is to get access to special deals and offers. Businesses that share special promotions, social-specific deals, and exclusive content on their social media pages are not only giving customers a reason to follow their companies, but also providing an avenue to generate sales via social media.

6. Get smart about check-in sites. Check-in sites like Foursquare provide an excellent opportunity for cross promotion. Businesses can tweet at customers checking-in to thank them for visiting, and then ask those customers to leave their feedback on sites like Google Places and Yelp. Foursquare is also a great place for customer acquisition, since businesses can actively reach out to people checking-in at competing establishments with special offers or deals meant to bring those people in.

7. Integrate social media into other business systems. Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. By integrating social channels with existing systems like Google Analytics and Omniture, and using a social media management system, companies can connect the dots and see the role social media is playing in their overall marketing efforts. Business owners should track the traffic that social media networks are driving to their websites and find out whether social media is converting certain activities into pre-defined goals, like sales or customer acquisition.

3 Crucial Keys To Considering Pinterest For Business

Pinterest is the latest social media craze. With high traffic and loud buzz, the social media platform has risen to position 3 in the rankings, just behind Facebook and Twitter. It is no wonder, therefore, that marketers are scrambling to put their creative talents to the test creating ways to use Pinterest for Business.

Pinterest is a great source of traffic, especially for people selling things women, largely, look on the internet to buy. If you are not on the number 3 social network, chances are your competition is and you are losing ground if you don't jump in. Whether you get a high authority backlink from the site is yet to be determined. However, the traffic for those making money selling crafts and design services have already been able to prove demonstrates the value of Pinterest for any skeptic.There's a mind shift you have to adopt when considering taking your business onto Pinterest.

1. Visual Pinterest is all pictures. There are ways to pin articles but they don't attract attention. The more dramatic, funny, curious, lushly colored pictures the better. You will see an explosion of info-graphics on the network - which is simply a way to tell a statistical and factual story in a visual, pinnable way. Because pinners, the community that uses Pinterst, are scanning for things that catch their eye. So, you have two choices: go ugly and loud or beautiful and arresting. Both are effective.

2. "Like-able" vs. "Comment-able" Usually on a social network, we encourage folks to jump into a conversation already in progress. Then listen, and comment where helpful. On Pinterest, discussion is less likely. People are grazing, and fast. If someone likes a pin it rises on the front screen just as effectively as if it were commented on... or so it seems so far. We do not have real analytical data open and obvious to the public, yet.

3. 80-20 Still In Play You can promote your own sales items on Pinterest, but only 20% of the time if you want to keep a band of loyal followers. Any more is considered spam. (As is the use of the price tag/snipe.) And, your "sale" has to be presented in the context of "sharing an opportunity", a "did you know that I offer" and "you may find this helpful." The rest of the 80% is you demonstrating your expertise by curating great content from other people. This is why a 3rd party endorsement from a colleague achieves a sale, with an inbuilt recommendation, and is an effective way to promote your own material, and theirs, when you reciprocate.

Pinterest is a social community, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of business going on there. It's like those big conferences where JV deals are going in on the sofas outside the main ballroom. It's like a cocktail where girls are sharing where they bought the necklace, or where the dads are saying is the best place to buy...you can imagine!

4 Ways Your Small Business Can Reach Out On Pinterest

As I am sure you are aware, Pinterest is being talked about in every coffee shop, hair salon and boutique from here to the Tatooie. But for those uninitiated, think of Pinterest as like twitter for photos and videos, but with a fun layout. Not only does your Pinterest wall show pictures and video from all your friends and followers in a scrolling box, Pinterest creates a captivating interface that posts pictures and video everywhere; up, down, left, right, all over your screen. Upon creation of your account, Pinterest will ask you your hobbies and interests and automatically connect you with relevant and frequent posters of content that fits your tastes. You can filter these posts (or pins) by topics or fans, thus allowing you to find things you are looking for instantaneously or just browse around and see who's looking at what. Pinterest welcomes new content and is a viral hotbed for interesting and fresh content.

The current profile of the average Pinterest user tends to skew toward women of all ages, but primarily those in the oh-so-precious 17-27 range, making it a hot new proving ground when marketing to those Millennials we've been hearing so much about. However don't forget about those guys out there. Men, who are typically later adopters of social media, are sure to jump in the game however as soon Pinterest picks up more steam and goes into the forefront of the social media world.

Unlike Twitter, Pinterest isn't about noise. However, it is about viral content. No need to post every photo from your last party here, save that for a Facebook album. Pinterest wants content that is fun to share, consider it visual bubble gum. Something that consumers can take in quickly, sweetly and be done with soon after. Using Pinterest in your everyday browsing is easy as all getout too. After registering your account, Pinterest will prompt you on how to install a "Pin It" button to your task bar which makes sharing the things you find across the web a simple and painless process.

Let's explore some ways you can harness Pinterest now to expose yourself to whoever your target market is:

Creative Use of Your Brand In Action

What are some fun or avant-garde ways to use your product? Show off the secondary and tertiary modes of use for your product or that special feature that your brand has that others don't. Consumers of your brand/product will either find it clever or relate to it a way they have or thought to use it; either way, people are likely to share this content.

Users Showing off Your Product

Brand advocacy and personal sponsorhip is all the rage in social media these days. After all, it is free advertisement. When you show off a brand ambassadors allegiance to your product, you make them feel closer to your brand. Support those people taking cool pictures of themselves with your project by posting them across Pinterest, be sure to give their page a link too!

Fun Modifications/Prototypes of Your Product

Has anyone added their own custom paint job to your product or modded it in their own special way? That is definitely viral, Pin it! What about a fun prototype version of whatever you sell that you've been tinkering with for fun? Like the idea I mentioned above in showing off creative uses of your product, show off these fun tweaks to your brand is sure may create a viral buzz.

Striking and Creative Advertisement

Has your ad team come up with a crafty or clever marketing campaign or print ad? If they have, Pinterest is a great place to show it off. A striking image with compelling copy can send your brand spinning across the site. Shoot to inspire, motivate, lead, or simply stand out from the rest.

There are many other ways to use Pinterest to your advantage. Frequent and compelling posting will prompt Pinterest to automatically make new users follow your account (just like it did for you when you first registered). By organizing your photos and pins on different boards and categorizing them by what your target audience wants to view, you will increase the virality of your content and make it easier for Pinterest to sort through and match you with random users. Make sure however that what you share is fun enough for anyone in your target market would want to share. And of course, like any social media campaign, don't forget to reciprocate.