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Buffer – A Great Tool For Sharing Content on Twitter

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

“Be Awesome on Twitter” say the folks at Buffer. Buffer helps you be awesome on Twitter by giving you a dead simple way to collect the things you want to tweet about and then share them with your followers throughout the day.

I’ve been using buffer (bufferapp.com) for just over a week now and I love it. I typically catch up on my reading early in the morning. Before buffer, if I found things I wanted to share I had two choices; 1) tweet them immediately or 2) cut and paste a link into a tool like Hootsuite and then schedule it to go out. While this doesn’t seem like a lot of work, it really interrupts the flow of reading.

With buffer, when I find something I want to share via Twitter, I simply click on a toolbar icon on my browser, or select the “Send to Buffer” feature in Google Reader. When I do, I get a dialog box like the one below:

From here, I can edit the description, add hashtags, etc. When I choose “Add to Buffer”, it goes into my queue where it will be posted on at on of the preset times in my schedule. Here is a screen shot of the dialog box that allows you to set your buffering pattern:

You can even have a different pattern for different days (i.e. weekend vs weekday) by using the “New Buffering pattern” button.

Another feature I really like is the ability to rearrange the items in your buffer using a simple drag and drop interface. Because I organize my Google Reader feeds by topic, I may have several tweets in a row in my buffer about a similar topic. Using the drag and drop feature, I can spread these out throughout the day.

In addition to using Buffer in your browser and Google Reader, you can even add items to your buffer via email. It looks like the folks at Buffer are also working on adding the ability to update Facebook as well.

Use this link to sign up for Buffer and we will both get some extra space in our account.

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Categories : social media marketing

Tags : social media marketing, Tools, twitter

Why it’s hard to sell via social media

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Due to time constraints, I had to omit this topic from my presentation at the Constant Contact event last week, so I thought I would share it here.

When I speak to small business owners about their frustrations with using social media to build their business, I often ask if they are not satisfied with the results of their marketing conversations or their sales conversations. Following this questions, it’s not uncommon for them to at me as if I have a grown a second, evil head.

Although sales & marketing are often lumped together, they are separate activities, each with it’s own type of conversations.

In a marketing conversation, we are working on building Know, Like, and Trust. Using social media, these types of conversations include answering questions, sharing info, pointing out resources, making referrals and recommendations – things like that. Marketing conversations are relatively easy to have via social media.

A sales conversation typically involves defining the problem to solve, determining if our solution can solve their problem, determining if they (the buyer) are able and willing to spend money to solve that problem, and if we can do so at a mutually agreeable price.

Sales conversations are generally more difficult to have via social media than marketing conversations. Depending on what you sell, you may or may not be able to have that conversation via social media. Most professional service firms can start the conversation via social media, but need to move it to another channel (usually telephone or face-to-face) to finish it.

If you are unhappy with the results of your social media efforts, I would suggest that you:

Understand what type of conversation you are having (or want to have) and what you want the outcome to be
Have a plan for transitioning from marketing conversations to sales conversations

photo credit by Peter Nijenhuis on Flickr

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Categories : Marketing Strategy

Tags : social media for professional service firms, social media marketing

Outsourcing Social Media Doesn’t Have To Be All or Nothing

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Leyl Master Black has an interesting article on Mashable.com that asks Should You Outsource Your Social Media Efforts? Leyl poses four questions to consider when deciding whether or not to outsource your social media activities:

Can effective social media drive your business growth?
How well is your social media working today?
Could outsourcing free up your time to focus on business operations?
How do you measure ROI?

In addition to these questions, I would add one more – Which parts of my social media activities should I outsource.

Most articles that I read about outsourcing social media address it as if it is an all or nothing proposition. I don’t know if this is because of how social media service providers package their offerings or the mindset of their buyers (probably a little of both). There are many activities that go into using social media as a marketing tactic. Some of those activities are better suited to outsourcing than others.

Here is a scenario that I see played out everyday. Business owners who want to learn more about social media will often spend their own time figuring out how tools work and setting up their profiles. It takes time and effort to get set up and get to the point where they can start making connections, having conversations, and building relationships. However, when they get to this point they are often mentally fatigued (it takes energy to learn this stuff) and\or they have to get caught up on all the tasks they put on hold while they where “learning social media”, so they look to outsource their social media activities.

Viewing this scenario with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it seems backwards. It would have made more sense to outsource the mechanical work (i.e. setting up profiles) and used their time and attention for the higher value activity of engaging in conversations.

A while back I wrote a post about the building blocks of a marketing tactic where I discussed this idea of looking at the different knowledge and skills needed to implement a marketing tactic. I like to use this as a framework for deciding which activities as best outsourced and which should be performed in-house.

If you are deciding whether or not to outsource your social media, remember you also have the option to outsource some but not all of your activities.

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Categories : Marketing, social media marketing

Tags : social media marketing

Metrics For Measuring Marketing Insanity

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

As a recovering CPA and a “systems guy”, I like metrics. Metrics can be helpful in helping us understand what’s happening in a system and may even help us set priorities and make decisions.

But sometimes, we can go a little crazy with them. Sometimes, I think we have metrics for the sake of having metrics.

A while ago I posted about Crazy CRM Math and how metrics like “expected revenue” have become standard even if though they provide no real value and may even be misleading.

Today I was reminded of one of my pet social media metric peeves when I read

“There has been a lot of debate in terms of the ideal following-follower ratio”

Seriously? Why?

We all remember that social media is a set of tools for communicating, right? If you are reading this post, I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess that you have been communicating for at least 50% of you life, fair? Have you needed this metric to decide who to talk to in your daily life? Or do you rely on things like what they say (content) and how they say it? Maybe how well they listen? Can they disagree without being disagreeable?

Here’s one of the nice things about Twitter and social media – you don’t need a ratio to gain insight into peoples’ behavior because you can observe the behavior directly.

You can see the conversations they are having. You can determine 1) if they talk about things you are interested in and 2) the likelihood that you will have a conversation with them in the future.

This idea of finding the “ideal following-follower ratio”, reminds me a lot of what goes on with search engine optimization (SEO). People who produced useful information received lots of attention (links). That attention led to success. We all want success, so we try to figure out their “secret”. We see they had lots of links, so we try to find ways to get lots of links without having to do the work of being helpful and creating useful information. Then Google makes a change and … is this sounding familiar?

IMO, if you are approaching social media purely from an SEO point of view, you are missing the point and wasting your time. If you want to be successful with social media, try focusing a little less on the math and more on the conversation.

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Categories : Marketing

Tags : Marketing, metrics, social media, social media marketing

Blending Your Online and Offline Professional Networks

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Friday, March 18th, 2011

[ This post originally appeared in my newsletter. I don't usually repost, but I've had a lot of interest in this topic recently, so I thought I would share it here as well]

We marketing types are good at giving advice about using social media tools to “have conversations” and to “build relationships”. Like a lot of advice, this is easier said than done.

Another theme growing in popularity these days is the idea of blending your online and offline communities. You may have read articles about using online activities to drive participation in your offline activities. Examples of this would include promoting your open house on LinkedIn or Tweeting daily specials to bring people into your shop or restaurant.

One of the challenges I see with this approach is it encourages broadcasting rather than conversations. It’s very difficult to build relationships or start conversations if the majority of your messages are commercials.

But what if you used your offline activities (and communities) to help drive your online activities?

Another challenge I hear business owners express is most of the people they see using social media are marketers – they have trouble finding potential customers or referral partners on social media sites.

One way we can overcome this challenge is to bring our existing “offline”, community with us to the online world. Giving your existing group of customers and referral partners another tool to stay in touch can help strengthen that community. I also find that it is easier to attract new members when you already have an established core as opposed to building a community from scratch.

Not comfortable using tools like LinkedIn or Twitter? You are most likely not the only one in your network that feels that way. The members of your network who are comfortable using these tools will be happy to help you. Here are some tips to help you learn these tools and strengthen your community:

Start small. Pick one tool (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) to focus on rather than trying to master them all.
Commit to posting one update a day. It really doesn’t matter what you post, share something about your business or your personal life with your group.
Commit to responding to at least one of the members in your group. Social media is a set of tools for having online conversations. Having conversations in this manner may take some getting used to, so practice with friends.

Focus on the conversations rather than the tools and I believe you will be successful.

Have you found ways to blend your online and offline communities? If so, drop me a note below, I’d love to hear from about what you’re doing.

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Categories : Marketing Strategy, Referral Marketing, social media marketing

Tags : networking, referrals, social media marketing

Google Profiles – a Must for Professional Service Providers

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Do you have a Google Profile page? If you are a provider of professional services, chances are, people will Google you by name when they are referred to you, hear you speak, or see an article about you in the paper. If you don’t have a Google profile page yet, you should, as it is a great way to make sure people can find you and your different profiles on the web when they search for you by name.

Google recently updated the design of their profile pages. They believe the new design will help highlight the information that’s most important to you, making it easier for people who visit your profile to get to know you. I do think the new profiles have a much cleaner look. And they have a greatly simplified interfaced for editing – you just click on the “Edit Profile” button and then click on the section of the profile you wish to update. It doesn’t get easier or more straight forward than that.

If you already have a profile page, you don’t have to do anything to upgrade to the new format, Google will update it automatically for you. Here is a sample of what the updated design looks like - https://profiles.google.com/billbrelsford/about.

In addition to making sure people will find you when they Google your name, using the link to your profile can be a great way to provide on link that people can use to find all of your different websites and social media profiles. For example, when I give a presentation, rather than having a “Contact Info” slide that contains a myriad of different links, I will often just include a link to my Google profile page. From there, people can decide if they want to visit my website or blog, or connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

If you don’t have a profile page yet, I highly recommend that you create one. To get started, just visit http://profiles.google.com.

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Categories : Marketing, social media marketing

Tags : marketing for accountants, marketing for lawyers, professional services marketing, social media marketing

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