Twitter

Choosing social media networks: Marketing the #PhillyMakerFaire

Laura — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 18:46:07 +0000

Choosing social media networks: Marketing the #PhillyMakerFaire

Marketing the Faire

In late March I took on a volunteer position as Head of Marketing for the first ever Philadelphia Mini Maker Faire "a volunteer-organized, family-friendly celebration featuring local do-it-yourself science, art, robots, crafts, tech, music, hands-on-activities, and more. It’s an event where people show what they are making and share what they are learning" says the official site. My first goal was to extend our reach through social networking.

When I first took on this role, we had a Twitter account and a Facebook page.

Seems good enough, why do more? My answer always is that your online presence should be where your customers are, and we want to reach everyone! Well not really, but since the event is brand new, building a community and a brand is a huge part of the task.

Of course, not all platforms are appropriate for everyone, but I do encourage you to use any that are appropriate for your business. For #PhillyMakerFaire I have set up a comprehensive, cohesive social network presence.

Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/PhillyMakerFaire/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/phillymakerfaire/
Twitter https://twitter.com/phlmake
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/phillymakerfaire/
G+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/116631378467518106973/116631378467518106973
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_DDs59K8d3vVXLZGK1UiLg/
Tumblr https://tumblr.com/blog/phillymakerfaire

Inserting a shameless plug for the Faire on June 24th at Pennovation Works! Buy tickets. Follow us. Share it. Like it. Pin it. Re-tweet. Love it.

Just. Do. It!

How do you pick which social networks are best for you?

Facebook: Facebook is still the king of the social networks, in spite of recent controversies. If you only make one social network, Facebook would be a good option.
If there can be only one. Choose Facebook.

Instagram: If you make anything physical, you should definitely get on Instagram and share beautiful photos of your work. Every photo tells a story, and Instagram is perfect to tell yours.
Best for visual creators: artists, photographers, builders, crafters, makers, architects, designers

Pinterest: Another visual social network, but with an emphasis on collections. If you craft or DIY, consider a Pinterest account.
Best for gathering and sharing visual information: DIY, crafters, makers, builders

Twitter: It's a great all around network for visual and written content, but if writing's your thing, you should be on Twitter.
Best for wordsmiths: writers, bloggers, comedians, poets

G+: Google plus hasn't lived up to it's potential, but if you have a physical location, you should claim your Business and set up the corresponding brand page on Google. Help your customers find you and make sure your contact information and hours are always up-to-date.
Best for business: brick-and-mortar, eCommerce, B2B, service providers

YouTube: Video is an engaging way to reach your audience and YouTube is the more social video hosting platform. Choose YouTube for video unless you're a filmmaker or animator, Vimeo would be the better choice.
Best for: DIY, vloggers, social video

Yelp: Yelp is the modern day BBB, you should definitely take the steps to claim your Yelp page and interact with the reviews -- both positive and negative. Another place to keep your hours and contact information up-to-date.
Best for business: brick-and-mortar, service providers, B2B, hospitality

NextDoor: After G+ and Yelp, I would claim your NextDoor business page so that neighbors can recommend you, and tag you in network.
Best for business: brick-and-mortar, service providers - especially home improvement, B2B

LinkedIn: B2B and other service providers should be on LinkedIn. It's an excellent network for connecting with other business as well as for finding great candidates for your team.
Best for business: B2B, freelance, professional services

All the social networks could fill a small book, so I'll stop here. Vimeo is great for filmmakers, Flickr for photographers, Houzz for architects, GitHub for programmers, and there are a huge range of industry specific social networks.

Next Steps

Building a cohesive brand; look your best online.

Follow this blog over the next few weeks and I'll share what I'm learning about reaching out to the press, social media automation, managing a project with dozens of volunteers, and working with an amazing design team, two passionate founders, and marketing partners who have provided excellent guidance and structure.

Expand your social presence today!

Laura Fri, 06/01/2018 - 11:46

Marketing

Facebook

Twitter

Private Messaging on Twitter

Laura — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 16:28:20 +0000

Private Messaging on Twitter

One of our clients asked me if I thought it was effective to reach out to new Twitter followers with a Private Message. I wasn't sure at the time but I've been curious as well. My personal experience has been that the majority of the PMs I receive are automated and impersonal. To me Twitter is such a short lived experience, I usually just reach out to followers publicly to thank them for following.

My inbox is mostly filled with offers and sales pitches. The better PMs say hi, link me to a website or another social network. These seem to be the most friendly. The worst and more common want to sell me eleventy-trillion followers - ugh! Twitter discourages spammy, automated messages and abusers can have their accounts suspended.

The first PM is selling me a very specific type of insurance, and the second wants a retweet. The third is nice but clearly automated. The fourth is selling me something, and the final request is to like a Facebook page.

From where I sit, private messaging in Twitter is so filled with automated messages, it's just not worth my time to check it.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I still check it! Never want to miss out on something, but I do sure get a lot of offers for 30K twitter followers for $10. ;)

Laura Mon, 07/07/2014 - 09:28

Twitter

New Twitter Look for Laura's Art Site

Laura — Fri, 23 May 2014 15:40:44 +0000

New Twitter Look for Laura's Art Site

Twitter's new layout is keeping me busy! My personal account is linked to my art site and was long overdue for a new look. I had honestly gotten a little tired of the pile of my sketchbooks, but hadn't bothered to update it. I went from this…

… to this. I chose an image from my artist book, La Sonámbula, and replaced the very blurry self portrait with my logo. The large photo across the top is especially fun to play with! I'll probably change it more often.

Here's a closer look at the logo and my pinned coupon post! I think this is a really great feature, especially because tweets fly by so quickly.

Laura Fri, 05/23/2014 - 08:40

Twitter

What, When & How to Engage on Social Media

Laura — Wed, 14 May 2014 21:56:41 +0000

What, When & How to Engage on Social Media

Our blog posts are automatically shared on our networks. That means we're sharing original content at a maximum of one per weekday which fits within The Social Media Guide's frequency. This looks to be ideal for LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus, but completely ineffective on Twitter. Below are my summaries of what I've been researching, as well as links to the original articles. Buffer is a free tool that I deliberately left out of last week's guide to pushing content to social networks. So after using Buffer for a few months, I found the free plans limit of 10 scheduled tweets to be limiting. That's only half a week . I discovered that Hoot Suite allows for tweet scheduling and has no limit! Although I'm not using it for scheduling tweets, I recommend subscribing to Buffer's blog for informative, well written, and inspiring articles.

What

Small Business Marketing Tools has this excellent chart examining what type of content works best on different social networks.

The takeaway is Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are best for sharing news, content, and stories while LinkedIn is best for sharing industry news and discussions. It seems pretty straightforward, but knowing your audience is half the battle.

How Long

The ideal length for content depends on a wide variety of factors. The Ideal Length of Everything According to Science gets into the statistics of engagement. Their results:

Tweet: 100 characters
Facebook post: less than 40 characters
Google+ headline: less than 60 characters
Headlines: 6 words
Blog posts: 1,600 words
Width of a paragraph: 40-55 characters
Email subject line: 28-39 characters
Title tag: 55 characters

When

The Social Media Frequency Guide really gets into the details of posting across social network platforms. The main takeaway is:

Post to Twitter at least 5 times a day. If you can swing up to 20 posts, you might be better off.

Post to Facebook/Google+ 5 to 10 times per week.

Post to LinkedIn once per weekday.

I highly recommend clicking through and reading the entire article as it's insightful and well researched. In addition to frequency, time of day can make a huge difference. For example, this article discusses 4 ways to find the best time to tweet.

Another excellent read on this topic is The Case for Reposting Content with three great results.

More traffic
Hit multiple time zones
Reach your new followers

It also goes over tips on how to implement and test the success with your own content.

It looks like I'll be spending significant time with Buffer and scheduling posts over the next few weeks. I'll report back if I discover any more great insights!

Next week we'll look at optimizing your content for SEO by using Google Trends.

This post was updated to include information about Hoot Suite January 22, 2015.

This post edited by the Revise It! Team.

If you need help creating your social media strategy, contact us today.

Laura Wed, 05/14/2014 - 14:56

Pushing Blog Content to Social Networks

Laura — Wed, 07 May 2014 15:29:21 +0000

Pushing Blog Content to Social Networks

For my art site, I believe in having a social media presence on multiple platforms. I also prefer to focus my time creating content for my own site and then share it from there. And of course, I want my content to look good. Currently I have fan pages set up on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and I also push my new content to my LinkedIn profile. Below are the tools I'm currently using.

All of this is done using the RSS feed. CMS driven platforms such as WordPress, Bloggr, or Tumblr should create a raw RSS feed automatically, although it probably won't look very nice. Feedburner can clean it up for you.

Feedburner can easily theme your RSS (Rich Site Summary) driven content and offers integration to popular readers. Feedburner also supports publishing your feed to Twitter. Here's what my Drupal RSS looks like before Feedburner…

…and after.

Definitely an improvement! To see what your raw RSS feed looks like navigate to YourSiteName.com/rss.xml.

HootSuite allows you to view and interact with multiple social networks. Their free plan includes integrating up to 5 networks allowing you to publish content to all of them at once. There is also the capacity for scheduled posts, location tagging, and integrated privacy settings.

I primarily use HootSuite to push my content to my Google+ page. I've tried a few different combinations of services and feeds and have found that using the Feedburner RSS feed with HootSuite looks best on Google+. This is controlled in the RSS/Atom section of HootSuite's settings. Here is a comparison of the IFTTT recipe vs. the HootSuite post.

Since my site is primarily images, I definitely prefer HootSuite on the left.

GPlus allows you to have a slightly nicer Google+ name. Basically a URL shortener, the name defaults to the long numerical Google generated name once it loads. Google+ is inviting page owners and individuals to change this, making this service obsolete.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a powerful service that allows you to automate almost anything. Helpful lifestyle updates such as receiving a text when you need to pack an umbrella or an email when tomorrow's forecast calls for snow are handy recipes that you can use. There are powerful back up tools that allow automatic back ups of photos posted to Flickr or Instagram to your preferred cloud service. For social network integration, I'm using these straight forward recipes designed by others to publish my RSS driven content. You can create triggers based on keywords in your content and more. These are the recipes I'm using now.

RSS to LinkedIn profile
RSS to Tumblr
RSS to Twitter (currently I'm using the Drupal module)
RSS to Facebook Fan Page
As I mentioned above, RSS to Google+ was not very pretty, so I'm using HootSuite for this push.

Log in to all of your social networks before signing up for HootSuite and IFTTT to make the integrations a little easier, and make sure you copy your RSS feed into each recipe. Also when you change passwords, it's a good practice to double check that your networks are still linked.

Drupal is king for content management, but the social network integration is better suited to pulling, sharing, and commenting. Twitter is the exception and is one of the easiest to integrate and gives specific control over individual posts. I followed these instructions.

Drupal Modules

Twitter
Oauth
Create your custom Twitter App

I find this to be the best and most direct social integration and I look forward to when other social networks are as smooth. The Twitter publishing shows up as one of the bottom vertical tabs when creating content and the content published can be customized globally through the content type edit page. Authors with the proper permissions can add custom hashtags and intros for any content.

If you don't have this level of access to your site or lack the expertise, Feedburner and IFTTT are excellent options for simple Twitter integration.

Next week's post will cover what content goes best with different social platforms, how long the ideal post should be, and what the best frequency is to reach out to your networks. Stay tuned.

This post edited by the Revise It! Team