Now, if you are a bigger brand it can be easy to set up a social media profile and have a couple thousand people “like” the profile and actively engage it, but for a smaller business this process can be excrementally harder. Many businesses try to leverage deals and such but without fans, this approach will not succeed. This is why I like to advocate taking your social media approach off of profile page and on to where customers are already interacting.

Here are three effective ways to do so:

Link to your Page Everywhere

Now while this tends to be scary, as not all customers are always “happy” with what you did for them, the potential benefits tend to outweigh the bad. First, channeling your customers to one location, by linking to your page on your website, email signature, and everywhere possible, to weigh in on your company allows you to control what is being said and take steps to fix and respond to it. This is something that word of mouth and the thousands of other outlets do not give you the option of doing.

Second, this approach also allows you to connect with the customers where they are at. Most active Facebook users spend at least 45 minutes a day on Facebook, if they are a fan of your business that can potentially give you a 45 minute window where the customer can see your status update and remember they needed to purchase something from you.

Create Other Pages

This is something many businesses tend to overlook, but can be an extremely helpful marketing tactic. Say you are a marketer for Pringles, you could create a fan page such as “help this Pringle chip get more fans then Miley Cyrus” (yes this was already done but it wasn’t done by Pringles). This is something that is easy to market as people like to fan interesting pages more then they like to fan the Pringles page itself.

With some simple marketing and link building you could have a page, that you are the admin of, which has thousands of fans that can also be potential customers. These fans can then be leveraged however you desire. The possibilities are endless.

Run Promotions

Let’s face it, people love free. You are always going to have an easier time getting fans if they have something to benefit from doing it. Say you sell a blue widget, you could post a video that says “Become a fan on Facebook and one lucky fan will win a blue widget when we do our drawing next week”.

Additionally, you could leverage potential fans by telling them that if they have friends that are also our fan they will win a blue widget as well (up to five friends). That way when someone becomes a fan of your site they will tell others to be a fan as well so if one wins they all benefit. Obviously you are out the price of the widget but you have to ask yourself isn’t this worth the cost of having committed fans that follow your pages? Carls Jr does this really well by letting their fans spin a wheel then giving them something free (I did this and got a free six dollar burger).

These are merely a few examples of ways you can market your social media pages without doing anything on the page itself. Remember optimization and good posts are important, but really the only thing stopping you from engaging with more fans is your own creative ability.

Personally, I’m not into social gaming and can’t really relate to the idea of spending money to buy a virtual tractor on Farmville. However, the millions of players spending their hard earned money on games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and CafeWorld is something you can’t ignore. Zynga, the maker of the most successful social games, is now valued at over $5 billion.

What’s interesting is that middle-aged women are the primary social gamers. Over 55% of social gamers are women with an average age of 43. Only 6% of the online social gamers are under the age of 21. From all those social media gamers, about a quarter end up spending real money. So it’s not me and my 16-year-old friends that are the primary players. The demographic is very different from the traditional video and online gamer player. While I can’t relate to those games, I am intrigued by the potential business opportunities.

Zynga is making over $100 million a year, purely from gamers who are paying for upgrades within these free social media games. Not long ago, a kid raked over $1,400 of debt on Farmville within two weeks, showing just how addictive these games can be.

I wonder, however, if in a year or two from now whether people will still buy guns on Mafia Wars and virtual seeds on Farmville? And if not, will there be other blockbuster social media games to replace them?

I leave you with this: Is this a brand new industry with a lot of great opportunities for entrepreneurs or is it a phenomenon that will quickly fade out?

Let me know what you think.

Actually this post is not about Twitter and Facebook but a valuable lesson in search engine optimization (SEO).  While I don’t profess to be an SEO expert, and I don’t typically blog about it, this is an interesting story based on simple observations.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about eBay, 10 Reasons Why eBay Sucks for Sellers because of my frustrations with the site. Today, I am still getting a steady amount of search engine traffic from visitors googling “ebays sucks”. It is is actually my number one keyword driving 100 visits per month because my site comes out on the first page for that search.

Here’s some data from Google Analytics:

How did I manage to get ranked so highly for “eBay sucks”?

I benefit from the fact that there is limited competition on those keywords because large blogs such as TechCrunch, Mashable, Huffington Post etc. can’t publish a post saying that any company — eBay, Facebook, Twitter — sucks. There are many reasons they can’t do that such as legal, strategic and branding.

Do people search XYZ sucks?

Of course, people are always frustrated with sites like eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, CNN, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and more. And a lot of people search with terms that come to their mind.

Here’s a screenshot from Google’s Keyword tool showing the number of monthly searches for “eBay sucks”, “Facebook sucks” and “Twitter sucks.”

What’s my point?

First, let me emphasize that I don’t recommend that anyone write a post stating that XYZ  sucks for the sake of SEO traffic. At the end of the day, the honesty of the content is what builds a loyal readership. Without that visitors won’t come back.

However, if optimizing your post for SEO is important to you, it makes sense to use casual language that people use in their day-to-day conversations. And because big blogs don’t have the ability to do so,  you should take advantage.

We’ll see if I get traffic in the next few weeks from searches on: Twitter sucks, Facebook sucks…

What are your thoughts? Since this post seems to be creating a lot of controversy let’s hear!

Twitterers:

1. Twitter spammer
The worst of all: the Twitter spammer. I can’t tolerate those twitter bots and spammers that will send out twits, and even replies with annoying messages like these: “@entrepreneurpro You can get 100 followers a day using http://yumurl.com/p74ZY6.” I don’t want to spammed constantly with similar scams!

2. The twitless twitterer
Then there are those twitterers who don’t twit at all but have followers. They shouldn’t be able to take up the precious twitter vanity links. And the people that follow them clearly don’t help either by supporting these wasters.

3. Celebrity twit
No matter how many millions of followers celebrities have I don’t want to follow them. I don’t care what their PR firm has to tell me. And I think that it’s sad that people like Britney Spears, Shaquille O’Neill and many others have millions of followers. For all we know there’s a much more interesting twitterer out there with only 10 followers.

4. Auto DM’er
I think that we could all agree that those people who send auto direct messages after you follow them are very annoying. For God’s sake I have 4,328 unread direct messages! The links to their sites, mafia invitations, and spam are all incredibly annoying that I don’t ever look at my messages any more.

5. Self Promoter
This may sound a little hypocritical because I find that promoting through twitter is very valuable. But I know that some people dislike it when people constantly promote blogs, sites and products on Twitter.

Facebookers:

6. Over Facebooker
Every time I go on Facebook I’ll see the same 30 people online in my chat window. Without a doubt they spend way too much time on Facebook and it shows. You’ll see them commenting, liking, posting everywhere and way too much.

7. Stalker
Yes there are stalkers on Facebook. They could be your friends or some random person. They’ll send you strange messages, constantly look at your profile, or even just comment way too much on your Facebook. This is why I wish that there was a real way to see who’s looked at your profile like on LinkedIn.

8. Facebook link’er
Basically like a self promoter on twitter, these people will post links on your wall or groups in order to promote themselves. Once is fine, but repeatedly doing this is just spam.

9. Friending abuser
As I mentioned in a previous post, those people who add too many people really don’t have that many friends in real life. Friending constantly is plain annoying.

10. Never ending inviter
I can’t take those people who will invite you to random events, groups and stupid apps. Such as:
“Howdy friend! How’d you like to be neighbors? Come join me in FarmVille, where you can grow delicious fruits and vegetables on your very own farm!”
Or
“Extreme Makover: Vending Machine Edition
Sunday, November 8th, 12:00am at…
You have been invited by …”
I’m not interested in growing my own farm on Facebook, or redesigning a vending machine!

What are your thoughts? Any suggestions, disagreements?

I know it might not be intuitive but usually people who have few friends on Facebook are those who have close relationships with other people in real life. As opposed to those with many Facebook friends who don’t have close relationships to other people.*

So next time you click “add as friend” take a minute to think. Are they really your friend? Does adding +1 to you friend count really change anything? Does accepting some random persons “friend request” really make you more popular?

NO.

If you agree with what I’ve said check these Facebook groups out.
“The more friends you have on Facebook the less you have in real life”

“For those of who you who believe that the more friends you have on Facebook, the less you have in real life. Or for those of you who want to prove that you have friends. Honestly, we don’t care if you join or not. We aren’t Facebook w*****.”

“Less is More: Quality of facebook friends over Quantity“
“The brainchild of Jane and Amy in opposition to indiscriminate friend accumulation on facebook. We do not need to be Paris Hilton, nor do we want to be Paris Hilton.”

Facebook Dump

Just don’t forget, don’t add anyone in that group as your friend!

*Disclaimer: these are only my thoughts none of this is scientifically proven. And I am sorry if anyone was offended in any way.

Looks like society as a whole is better on the “new social brandscape” side. So I’ll be seeing you on that side.

If Sites were People

Facebook teen:

I’m a teen. I have Facebook. All of my friends have Facebook. Sadly today to be considered a normal, “social” teen, Facebook is a must.

Twitter yapper:

This one is slightly ironic because most kids yet alone teenagers don’t even use Twitter. I like though how you can see this annoying kid talking away like everyone does on Twitter.

MySpace musician:

MySpace is going down the drain; I never really understood it or liked it. The last supporters of MySpace are definitely the musicians though, portrayed perfectly in the photo.

Wikipedia nerd:

The Wikipedia nerd was also very nicely done. Wikipedia, a site based on never-ending information seems fitting for a geek.

Deviantart artist:

I’ve never used Deviantart but I visited the site and this artist definitely looks like she would fit it.

Youtube prankster:

Youtube could have had a lot of different people but the artist decided to stick with the prankster, gangster idea. Personally I love the flipping off idea, it’s very fitting to YouTube.

Google engineer:

My favorite one here is Google. First of all, he’s bigger than all the others, just like Google is on the internet. Second, he’s looking down on everyone else because he seems to be above everyone’s level. And three he looks like a genius just like Google…

Please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions!

Social Media

Social media is a platform that connects you to the entire world, whether using text, video or image. It can be used to connect with people, to market, to interact, to learn and to understand. Today’s most widely used networks include: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Myspace, WordPress and Linkedin.

Wikipedia also gives a great explanation.

Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratizati

on of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Why waste your time with this? It’s time consuming, invades your privacy and is wrought with annoying marketers. The bottom line is,  using social media can be enjoyable, profitable and a highly sociable experience. For some, it might even be nostalgic if they reconnect with people from their past.  If you are a social media newbie and want to get started, now would be a great time to register on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin.