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Sunday, November 27, 2011

5 Effective Social Media Strategies

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Now that you have put across your first tweet, blog post or created your Facebook Page or Google+ Page, you need a sound plan to succeed. Scout the net & you should find tons of links to help you succeed & I promise the following post might not be too different, but then its just some of the strategies that have help me while starting for zero. You'll need these strategies, as there are competitors who are ready to out-do you & by the time you master it, a success story would have already been born.
(Image Courtesy: Creative Commons)
Do read this before you dish out the next piece of information for your followers:

1. Identify your target customers

Before you begin your next update, gauge your target audience - area of interest, age, geographical area. Gather an idea of what they would like to hear or see.  Ensure that your blog has appropriate visual appeal and aesthetics to keep the reader interested or have interesting Twitter headline to make it clickable.

2. Scout appropriate content

To ensure that you share content, that would make your customer "share", research on the subject. List out the sites, blogs, news within the domain & subscribe to feeds. Staying updated with the trends will help you to share latest contents which is what your customers are looking for

3. Update regularly

The only reason will have followers is they expect information from you. Keep updating, and once you share regularly, they will know where to look out for any new happenings or get information on the subject. Set aside atleast 15-20 minutes in a day to update. And with the host of tools available now - Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, its easy to schedule your updates.


4. Interact

The best way to master your social media skill is to interact with other users or you audience. Be prompt to respond to comments - positive or negative. Start making connections with the folks from your industry, start participating in discussions, share your thoughts. The law of attraction works very well in this medium.

5. Promote

Now that your content is focused & an audience set up, start promoting self or business. This will ensure that your stories are heard instead of it being picked up from all of the noise generated on social media channels.

And these were some of my strategies to succeed over social media. Few of them are easy while other might take a while but remember, social media does take time and money.

Well yes on Thanksgiving & otherwise too, a big thanks to all the readers of this post and my blog. Love to hear your comments or success stories as usual.

Good Day!!!

Saturday, November 12, 2011

How to create Google+ Business Page

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One of the biggest news of this week was the launch of Google+ Business Page. It was the news that we had been waiting for since the launch of Google+. True to industry grapewine, it has indeed placed itself directly against Facebook. Also, the creation of Google+ Business Page was like a walk in the park, I had no rumblings at all.

Presenting here, some easy steps to create the Google+ Business Page, which has also been explained at the Google+ Blog.

Step 1

Go to http://plus.google.com/ and login with your Google+ credentials. On the right hand bottom, you should find a link "Create a Google+ Page" or you can directly go to http://plus.google.com/pages/create and login and proceed to step 2.

Step 2

On the create page, select appropriate category for your business. Enter the name of your business, website and sub-category. Based on the content of your page, select the viewer type.

Step 3

Next step is to customize your page. Make sure you have a catchy tag line, something that would entice the viewer to visit or like it. You can even upload a photo of your business.

Step 4

Finally, spread the information about creation of your page. You can share it with your colleagues or a small group initially. But before that, do load the page with some content. That will help viewers to understand your focus areas & want them to visit back.

Step 5

There you have, your own personal Google+ Page. Get going, invest sometime to post content regularly to have more visitor on the page.


Few of the best pages I have come across till now and more recently Toyota too.

Thanks for reading through & here's my page.


Sunday, November 06, 2011

To Klout or not!!!

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"Klout just did a Netflix"

Read one of the tweet on my timeline & that prompted me to go & look back at my score. Aghast!!! Mine had dropped drastically.


One of the most buzz all over the social network in last couple of week has been about Klout scores either dropping significantly or in some case improving. The buzz was good enough to have an hashtag #OccupyKlout at one point of time. That picked up my interest & have a closer look at the issue. And I found the Klout announcement saying it had changed its algorithms measuring your social engagement & influence. Which truly meant that it was trying to have a close look at the traversal of your content across the network.

According to this post at Klout site, the changes shall cover:

True Reach - How many people you influence
Amplification - How much you influence them
Network Impact - The influence of your network

While they promised accuracy, transparency and scores either remaining same or going up, but from the reactions that I see, the number of people disgruntled with the lower scores is far more than the ones having an improved score. But then the real question was:

Should I really care about my Klout Score??

Yes, I have to say a big emphatic yes to it. Regardless of how you view it, the score helps you to understand if the group of people you have been interacting or have as your followers are truly influential. Having a network of influence does matter as at end of the day you are marketing your brand or services. The score also gives you an enormous recognition + reputation as "influencer" or otherwise. 

But then, what went wrong??

As I gather the dust around it, I read that Klout applied the algorithms on historic data too, and the re-calculated the old scores too. This was probably the biggest mistake it did. Having wiped out the previous scores certainly hit users in the wrong place.

The other place where it wronged seems to be the lack of transparency. It is highly impossible to tell why you score is falling down as the company has kept its algorithms secret.

And neither did the following tweet help:



While the jury on whether the change in algorithm effects the clout of Klout is still not ascertained, but the fact remains that there are now fewer individuals who really trust Klout and it might have to lost the ground a bit to PeerIndex and Kred.

Thanks for reading through. Appreciate your comments.