5 'P'illars of Social Media

(Image credit: 'Idea Go' at freedigitalphotos.net)

"2012 has arrived & here's me wishing you a fabulous year ahead"

The goal for year forward for all of us will be to become as engaged with customers as it could be possible. Social Media is one such medium which offers limitless opportunities - product launches, interesting offers, events, photos to get engaged or even generate new business.

In the first post of the new year, am listing the 5 key pillars to achieve success on "Social" channels - Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus et al. Whether you are starting your social media journey or you're already at the top, these few ideas can help you notch up the efforts in the right direction.

1. People

Invest in 'people'. Get on-board people with knowledge about the medium - the multiple channels, SEO, PPC; to ensure that your organisation covers all the possible medium of communication. Ensure, you or the team engages with the audience thereby giving a personal attention to them.

2. Process

Build a set of questions on your motivation to target the medium. That will help you in demystifying the medium and enable to streamline the process to achieve the required goal. Make sure to document the process which can improve the depth of knowledge assets.

3. Product

Put technology to work. There are companies who have already developed "products" that help you take greater advantage of the existing social medium

- Timing your updates - Use Timely or Buffer (@BufferApp)
- Social Media Monitoring & Engagement - Use Radian6, Commun.it

4. Proliferation

Scoop the web, certain best practices are already out there. Utlize these assets & spread awareness about your brand, activities across diffrent social channels.

5. Promotion

Since you have taken steps to proliferate your organisation, brand the last critical step is to promote. Focus on engagement (2-way conversation), quality of your messages (not the number of messages). Engagement with customers will lead to stronger relationship & word-of-mouth publicity. But remember, social media is not spamming.

Thanks for reading through. Please do comment & share your thoughts, let's get engaged!!! Happy New Year!!!

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The New Twitter Brand Pages

Twitter recently rolled out changes to the UI and many of you will agree that the new look is quite suave & gives the user a great perspective on the investments folks at Twitter are making to become user friendly. In this race of social media platforms to out do each other, the users are at a great advantage to experience some great innovations.

But the one feature that Twitter rolled out & what could be potentially a BIG competition to the world of Facebook & Google+ is the launch of its brand pages. The folks at Twitter have been rather kind enough to not name the feature as "Brand Page" but as "Enhanced Profile Page". The new feature though is available to select users at the moment & I had a chance to have look at the page of @McDonalds

Brand Page Features:

1. Pin a Tweet/Feature your content

And as I hear from the street, one of the best ability of this new feature is to pin a tweet or again in Twitter's parlance is "Feature your content", which effectively allows the brands to highlight one of its most engaging content helping them to drive much more inbound traffic. This tweet remains at top of the timeline and has the ability to hold non-textual content which would be most useful when brands would like to share an image or video. (Look how enticing the Big Mac looks :-) )

2. Banner/Header
 

The other big change was to have your brand logo, image, tagline or other content at the top which could be a major differentiator for visitors to classify from normal user page to a brand page.

There are 20 more Twitter Brand pages other than @McDonalds and the list can be found here.

What's your view?? IMHO, I am looking forward to the day when Google+ or Facebook launches the "pin" feature, but until that time, Twitter shall be the most chosen medium to share brand information.

Do drop in your comments/feedback below or at my Facebook Page or Google+ Page or tweet @MalharBarai

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5 Effective Social Media Strategies

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!!!

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How To Get Over The Social Media Noise

With plethora of Social Media Platforms do you find yourself lost?? It seems so often that with an unprecedented rush by enterprise to implement marketing strategies unheard of till now and grab your share of attention thereby adding to the "noise" in the social space. With millions of users across Facebook, Twitter & add to it the latest entry of Google+, the "noise" created is overwhelming.

Take this, it took Google+ only 16 days to notch up 10 million users since its launch whereas Twitter took almost 780 days and Facebook 852 days to have the same number of users. And, the "noise" created by these platforms with its multiple information feeds, ads is just increasing which might shadow over the real information (a reason you went social)

But as enterprise, with growth in number of social platforms, you ought to master the art of getting the users attention to the platform of choice & span several minutes to get over the other "noise". You need to be able to connect with the audience, talk about the topic they are interested in and be able to share it without inhibition.

Here are few tips to get over the Social Media Noise:

1. Enchant readers with the right titles


How many times have you given a pass to one of you Twitter update or a Facebook update, because you  didn't find the message interesting. The trick is, have a subtle message & do not oversell. No one likes to be told to act in a certain way. One of the great post by Jeff Bullas explains it.

2. Spread message across multiple platforms

I have been following Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore (Mashable) - you name a platform and these guys are already there. They are the best in business and have ensured to ride over the Social Media wave and get their message heard. They were amongst the first few users on Google+, and ensured that their posts continued on the new platform thereby increasing their fan base.
 
3. Post regularly & multiple times in a day

Have a schedule, make sure you post regularly. Coke Studio by MTV India makes sure to post regular music updates on their Facebook page. This ensures that the massive fan base they generated during the first season remains glued and when they go into the second season, they'll have a certain number of fans increasing their TRP ratings.

The other lesson that I learnt from Guy was to post multiple times in a day & the simple reason we tend to overlook is - you never know which part of the world is reading your message. Posting the same message multiple times ensures that fans in any geographical location will have it in their timeline/feed.


4. Reply to comments and engage readers 

Once you have posted, expect people to comment. These comments could be good, bad or ugly at times, but then readers have the right to share their point of view. In the same vein, it would be good that you reply to each of these message & help readers to understand your point of view. The more you engage, readers will tend to love your post. They will also help in having you make an informed decision on certain subjects. Engagement will ensure stickiness to your page as the readers are comfortable that you understand them.

And how to ensure you get comments, read this. One of the best I have come across so far.



5. Be Concise

This is the age of fast-food. With the kind of attention span we have these days, no one will read a 100 line post. I have been a huge fan of Seth Godin's posts. For me, they are the perfect examples of how your posts should be. "precisely concise". It ensures that your posts are read & you invoke the readers to think. If they want to know more, comment are left & then there could be further engagement.

So what do you think - hopefully the above will help you stay above the "noise". Do comment, I do engage with my readers :-) 

You can leave your comment either here on the blog or my Facebook Page or Google+ or just Tweet me.

(Image Courtesy: FreeDigitalPhotos.net - Renjith Krishnan, Danilo Rizzuti)

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Google+ Goes Public

Yes, that's what the morning news are filled up with. Streams proclaiming Google+ going public.


After almost 3 months of being in beta, public logins are being welcomed now.


The latest updates also includes "search" (it had to), where it can search for posts based on the search string


Add to it, more features to "Hangouts" like - on phone, on air, sketchpad, docs, named hangout, 


Catch-up more at Google+ Official Blog


Am also around at Google+ : +Malhar Barai

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What's new in Google+ (Google Plus)

Seems this has been the most eventful month from the guys at Google+ (Google Plus). They have laid out an awesome list of offerings and challenged competition.

One of the best till date is:

1. Google+ APIs

With the post aptly titled "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", Chris Chabot shared the news of Google+ (GooglePlus) unveiling the APIs on 16th.

What can you do with the API?? 

If you are thinking that the API shall be incorporated with your favorite Social Media tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, let me tell you, this could take a while as the current API are read-only. Which means, you cannot post externally.

So how will it help??

It will help you to retrieve posts, public profiles and build some analytics around it. 

More details here.

2. Google+ Hangouts

Yes, Google+ (GooglePlus) Hangouts have been there since their launch, but seems the +Team has been trying to improve it ever since. On 10th of this month (9/10) it released the "Take the floor" feature which allows users to (From +Chee Chew):

1) have everyone mute their audio.
2) when you want to sign something, hit Shift+s.
3) when you see yourself as the main video, that's your cue. you've got the floor... everyone's main video has switched to you. sign away.

What does it mean??

If you happen to be in any of the hangout session, very frequently it the person with the maximum amount of noise (background or otherwise) would have got on the screen, irrespective of whether they wanted it or not. The new feature eliminates it by having you do the "Shift+S" to get you on the main video & once you're on, speak up.

3. Photo Locking

On the 8th, +Matt Steiner's team added the ability to lock photos on your Google+ account, thereby limiting the sharing of your photos. The security feature for the photos can be applied from 2 different places - photos page & stream.

A word of caution though, the post containing your photo also gets locked.


Matt Steiner's Post.

4. Mobility Updates

The first week of the month saw a slew of updates for the mobility devices.

a. +1 button on mobile web

1st of September saw the +1 button, which enables users to share content on Google+ (Google Plus) was released for the mobile web. The latest release allowed users ability to share content as they surf, without any inhibitions :-)

b. New iOS app

On 6th, the new release of Google+ for the iOS platform. The latest release gave an ability to the users to reshare posts from the Apple devices. An arrow at the bottom allowed users to reshare content & also the ability to select the users with whom it can be shared.

The same was released for the non-iOS platforms (read Android) on 7th.

Thanks for reading through. Do drop in your comments, feedbacks & will be glad to hear them.

Great Day!!


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History of Social Networking

History of Social Networking

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