Fan Page Analytics

Once youve developed a base of followers, you need to make your Twitter account more interesting finding ways to encourage people want to tell their friends about your account, so that you can grow your followers exponentially.

This is easier said than done. It’s not uncommon to see companies reach a plateau, where they’re losing followers as fast as they gain them and find themselves unable to get their account to grow any further.

But there are ways to recapture your audience and make your account relevant again. Here are three such methods with tips for implementing them in your industry.

Potentially Useful Tweet Ideas

Organize Tweetups In many ways, Twitter is really just a large community, and as the community gets to know each other, it’s not uncommon to find that people want to take their online relationship into the offline world. On Twitter, these are often known as “Tweetups” events planned via Twitter for Tweeters to gather in a specific location and mingle. Tweetups can be a great way to turn your online relationship with the customer into an offline relationship, and potentially improve your brand image and likability.
Tweet Secret Offers Having special offers only available to those following you on Twitter is a great way to make yourself relevant. An example of this would be running a coffee shop and having a drink that isn’t on the menu that you can only order if you know the name of the drink a name given out through the Twitter account. People that like your business will want/need to follow it in order to know the next offer, and that makes your account more relevant to consumers.
Tweet Contests You should also consider integrating contests with your list. You can offer a chance to win an iPod for the first 100 people that retweet your status, or you can give away a $5 gift card to Amazon for the funniest caption idea to a photo you post on your account. What you do and what you give away depends on your audience, the number of followers you have, and so on, but all of these keep the interest level in your Twitter account high.

These represent some of the many potential ways that you can improve the long term outlook of your Twitter account. The key thing to remember is that you’re not the only business vying for that customer.

Lots of businesses use Twitter to interact with potential customers. You need to find a way to set yourself apart, otherwise just like in the real world the customer may grow bored or dissatisfied and leave you for a competitor. You should also consider coming up with your own methods in order for your account to stay interesting to anyone following you. This is a great starter list, but dont let it be the only tricks you try.

Social media and Facebook in particular can be extraordinarily powerful tools in helping you generate new prospects, build your brand and stay fresh in the minds of both current and future customers. So, at the top of your marketing to-do list should be creating an eye-catching Facebook Fan Page. Here are some tips to help you do just that.

Your Photo – Photos set the tone for everything else you do. The first thing someone sees when they land on that Page is your photo for the brand, website or company youre trying to promote. So, choose a high quality, clearly defined picture that your prospects can easily see and recognize.
Custom Tabs – The biggest brands on Facebook (Coca Cola, Nutella, Whole Foods) use custom landing tabs to provide useful information that people will recognize easily when they view the Page. You dont have to spend thousands of dollars developing a finely tuned Page, but you should customize as much as possible. There are services that will build a custom iFrame landing page app for less than $100, allowing you to duplicate your branding from your website on your Fan Page.
Fans – People are inherently followers. If they see that you already have 1,000 fans and a good number of comments and likes, they are much more likely to click the Like button themselves. You should take advantage of this. Use Fiverr to populate your Page with Likes and start encouraging friends, family members and colleagues to leave comments or likes on your status updates to boost your profile.
Content Matters – Your Fan Page can look incredible but if there is no content, no one will find it. Not only does content get you into news feeds more often, it is the only thing that will keep someone on your Page long enough to click that button. Make sure you use it to your advantage to attract attention and build relationships. A Like is all great, but you want people returning in the future to ask you questions, engage with your content and hopefully convert into customers.
Where Are You? – Too many brands rely entirely on their image to get the message across. Its all fine and good to post a picture of your logo and website but you must also personalize the page to some degree with pictures of you, your employees, happy customers and whatever else will lend an air of authenticity to your page. People want to know not just what you offer, but who you are.

The easiest way to encourage people to truly engage with your Fan Page, ask questions and care about your business is to create a Page that demands attention and offers plenty of ways to captivate and hold that attention. If you do this and spend time on the Page interacting with your Fans, Facebook can be a very successful platform for your brand.

Almost everyone reading this probably has a Facebook Page. For your business, website or brand, youve taken the time to create a Page, add some blog posts and solicit Likes. Then…nothing.

The Fan Page sits there, gathering dust and being ignored by the Internet and its many citizens. One of the most effective ways to jump start engagement on your Facebook Page and attract a larger audience is to use custom iFrame applications to enhance the number of things that can be done on your Page.

With recent updates to Facebooks terms of service, the process for doing this changed some. Here are the things youll need to know to take advantage of the process and start generating more Fan interest with a custom iFrame App.

What Is an iFrame App?

An iFrame is an embedded external website hosted on a different server and shown on your Facebook Page. You can customize the HTML and CSS to whatever you want and create content that supplements your site, sells your products, or sends people to key landing pages on your website.

There are some things to consider though as you cant use just any page for your iFrame application:

Security – Your iFrame content must be hosted on a secure server, meaning SSL certification. If you dont have your own server space, youll need to contact a host such as HostGator and set this up, along with the needed security protocols. If you dont have hosting and dont want to pay for it, Facebook offers cloud hosting for your apps.
Sizing – When creating your app, it must be 520 pixels wide to match the width of a Facebook Page. You can use CSS and any HTML tags you want in this file to create visual effects for your content.
Install Facebook Developer App – Make sure to install the Facebook developer app on your page with http://www.facebook.com.developers. You must allow access to your information to do this.

Creating an App

As you start creating an app, make sure to provide an App Display name and Namespace. Follow the instructions on screen for doing this. Write down the App ID and the App Secret value given to you by Facebook as you will probably need these for your off-site content.

The next step is to integrate your app with Facebook – do this by selecting Page Tab from the menu options on screen. Give your Page Tab a name and provide the URL of the file that will be displayed on your Facebook Page. Make sure to provide the same information for secure Page Tab URL with the https:// version of the URL.

Finally, when done, enter the following URL into your browser:

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL
Replace YOUR_APP_ID and YOUR_URL with the settings you provided above and youll be asked whether you want to ad your Page Tab.
Follow the final directions to add your new app and youre set – customized iFrame application on your Facebook Page using the new rules. Have fun developing a powerful iFrame that showcases your website and business to its fullest.

To be fair, it would be unnecessarily limiting to say you should only be interesting on Google+, but at the same time, there is something fundamentally different about Googles new social network and the established behemoths of Facebook and Twitter. You still need to encourage engagement. You still need to create conversations. You still need to generate interesting content that provides value to the people in your circles.

But there is something different about Google+ – something about how it is presented and how you share information with people and the sheer number of cool tools Google offers to do it all. Its different and that means there are more ways to engage people. Lets take a look at what this means.

Interactivity Matters

Its all fine and good to say you should engage with people on Facebook, but its not always easy. You need to lure people, enticing them into your web of useful content to get their attention.

Google+ offers a tremendous number of tools to make the process a lot easier. At the top of the list are their messaging and communication tools. Hangouts are already being used by people to sell interactive sessions. ChefHangouts.com is a prime example, where chefs sell slots to learn their favorite dishes via Google+ Hangout.

Your phone becomes more important in the equation as well as you can send messages, have video chat sessions, and interact with people in a dozen different ways from anywhere – assuming you have an Android device or iPhone.

Offering Useful Content in Fun New Ways

To be interesting, you need to be different and to be different you need to put every tool at your disposal into your bag of tricks. Create special circles in which you offer exclusive content. Then give people ways to move their way up through different levels to access the highest level content you give away.

You can hold special Hangouts to introduce new products, answer common questions from your readers or generate interest in your services.

You can offer freebies to your public circle and get your free reports or eBooks listed in Googles SERPs where they will draw even more traffic and build your network of followers.

The beauty of Google+ is that there are so many ways to engage with people at different levels of interactivity. Your creativity is the limit and thats a refreshing change from the way weve been forced to do business and interact with people on Facebook for the last half decade.
Taking Google+ to the Next Level

If youre ready to take action and use Google+ to draw attention to your most useful services and interesting products, now is the time to really think outside the box. Get excited about what youre able to do with it and start trying new things and youll be shocked at what is possible.

Google+ is the newest and in many ways, the most powerful social media tool currently available, but that doesnt mean it isnt without its fair share of time wasting features. Avoid the following five features, whether you are surfing for reshare opportunities or actively trying to engage with your followers.

Games – The most obvious time waster on any social network is gaming. Since Farmville launched in August, 2009, the gaming features on Facebook have killed billions of combined hours of productivity and made a novelty game company filthy stinking rich. Dont let the allure of gaming (and the convenient quasi-excuse that youre interacting with people) to eat your time.
Looking for Reshares – There is no perfect reshare, nor should you try to find one. If you find something worth sharing put it up, but never sit down with the sole intention of looking for a reshare opportunity. You could write your own post from scratch and provide more value, get more benefits and have more fun in less time.
Reorganizing Your Circles – Circles are incredibly useful for segmenting and targeting your message to specific groups of followers, but they can also be a tremendous time waster. Much the same as reorganizing your email inbox, circle juggling accomplishes nothing more than making you feel productive when you are not. Instead of organizing your circles, send messages to them and solicit interaction from your friends.
Reciprocating Shares and +1s – The goal of Google+ is to create actual, interactive relationships with prospective customers, buyers and marketers. If you spend all of your time clicking the +1 button on everything you read or resharing content that clogs your feed, youre not interacting; youre just going through the motions.
Paring Down Your Lists – Dont worry about who you follow. If someone starts to spam your feed, block them or put them in a different circle. Otherwise, dont worry about it. Spending time going through your list every week and removing people you dont want to follow is a waste of time. And if youre worried about other people seeing who you follow, simply hide those circles so no one can see how many people you have in your circles.

Google+ can be an exceptionally powerful tool, but only if used properly and with an eye for the right details. Dont waste time doing things just so you feel like youre being productive. Always ask yourself if the task youre performing will have a positive impact on your marketing campaign and if it will attract new followers. If not, its filler and you could easily use that same time for something better.

Enjoy what Google+ has to offer and dont get caught up in the sheer volume of options at your disposal and youll do quite well.

Twitter is, in many ways, a madhouse. There are millions of users tweeting every thought they have, creating a sea of information that may or may not be interesting to anyone. As a business, your goal is to create tweets that people want to read tweets that give your business a positive image and make people want to follow you or retweet what you have to say.

That’s easier said than done of course. While there are several types of Tweets, only some will benefit your business, while many others could potentially harm your reputation. Below are seven different styles of tweets and what they say about your business.

Useless Tweets The reality of Twitter is that many of the tweets people share are completely useless. No one cares if you’re tired or hungry. No one wants to see you laugh out loud without an explanation, or make a smiley face, or tell Twitter “Good Morning.” These tweets are debatably acceptable if you run a personal Twitter account, but they have no place in the business world and should be avoided.
Famous Quotes Famous quotes are extremely likely to be retweeted and can be useful for your business. But quotes can also be overused, especially by companies that focus too heavily on retweets and not enough on quality content. If you share quotes too often you may bother your followers, so while the occasional quote can be beneficial, it should be infrequent.
Your Own Quotes Writing phrases that read like quotes but are otherwise your own thoughts can also be very popular. Essentially these would be described as “deep thoughts” but written with prose that resembles what one would see in a quote. Again, these should be infrequent, but can be more frequent than famous quotes.
Jokes Jokes are easily the best type of tweet. They are easily retweeted, and if they’re funny and not inappropriate they can be a great way to brand your business. It’s also impossible to make jokes too often. The only real issue with this is that most people especially those that run business Twitter accounts are not actually funny. Make sure that you’re actually a funny person before you make joke tweets.
Information Information is probably the primary way companies use Twitter. Essentially, information is anything that anyone would find interesting. It may be about your company, your products, your services, or even your life, but it’s not designed to get laughs or be found as emotionally compelling. Rather, it is designed to inform your followers about something. These are the most professional tweets your company can make, but they can also be boring depending on your industry.
Breaking News Another extremely popular type of tweet is breaking news. When something important happens in the world, you can tweet about it and/or share your opinion while the story is still at its hottest. Unfortunately, you may also get into trouble if the news is at all political or controversial so it may not be a good idea to break news. Also, millions of other Tweeters are likely doing it too.
Links Finally, there is the simple link, usually to a page on your website or an article. This type of tweet is useless if you don’t have a lot of followers and can make your Twitter account look like spam if you do it too often. But it’s otherwise an important part of marketing and perfectly understandable if the content on the webpage is relevant to your readers.

There are many different types of tweets, and some are better than others. If you’re going to use Twitter for your business, make sure you tweet in a style that represents it well, and not just the style that most people use when on Twitter.

So you created a new Google+ account, are starting to fill out your account and are already discouraged at how slowly your network is expanding. Unlike Facebook and Twitter there are no established tricks to build your network at rapid speed. So, to help you jump start your Google+ network and get the kind of following you need to really succeed, here are 7 simple strategies the pros are using.

Share Circles with Other People – Google+ allows you to share circles with others. Exchange circles with people you know in your niche and start growing your network at rapid speed. If you have close friends or partners on Google+ who are ahead of you in growing their networks this is a great strategy.
Create Incentives for People to Follow You – The secret to growth on any social network is to offer value to your followers. This means incentivizing the process. Offer quality free reports, interesting freebies, and first dibs on new blog posts, products or partnerships to people who follow you.
Add Heavy Hitters to Your Circles – Use www.recommendedusers.com to find people with big networks and active feeds on Google+ in your niche. You probably already know a few of them, simply from the blogs you read each day. Now, borrow some of their followers and youll soon see a nice spike in your circle count.
Join Top 100 Circles to See What the Big Boys Are Doing – Get into the top ranking circles of Google+s biggest users and see what they are doing to add value to their profiles and drive subscriber growth. Youll be shocked at how simple some of their tricks are.
Offer Incredibly High Value Content – First Shots on Google+ – If you write a new report, post a new blog entry or launch a new product, make sure the first people to hear about it are on your social networks. This incentivizes them to pay attention and encourages others to follow.
Integrate and Cross Promote – Dont use just one social network. You may like Google+ best, but your customers and prospects might not. Use Facebook and Twitter, place your Google+ badge on all of your websites and create an email and forum signature to encourage people to follow you.
Create a Google+ Page – If you have a business or a brand, create a Page and use it to further brand yourself. Pages allow you to reach out to more people from more angles, advertise your brand and generate a buzz that can translate to more followers on your personal account.

The key to growing your Google+ circles at rapid speed is to be innovative, creative and willing to try new things. Do all three and youll be well on your way to four figure growth in no time.

As a business owner looking to market your Twitter account, you need to be proactive in finding followers. This means you need to follow people yourself so that you can both interact with them and hope that they follow you back.

Unfortunately, it's not uncommon to find that many of the people on Twitter are unbearable. The Internet is a worldwide meeting place, and while you can meet some very interesting people, you can also follow those that you would otherwise ignore in the real world.

As a business these followers are still useful, but you should be prepared for what kinds of tweets you will read. Below is a breakdown of some of the more irritating types of Tweeters.

Tweeter 1: The Stream of Conscious

Perhaps no Tweeter is as irritating as the one that shares every thought they have, no matter how nonsensical or irrelevant to the day's events. You'll often find a string of 10 or more tweets all from within one or two minutes where the individual shares every possible thought or emotion they have, often without a reason or trigger. This form of thought spam can make it hard to run your Twitter account as you weed through it for more relevant, interesting posts.

Tweeter 2: The Breaking News

For some reason, people on social networking sites like to be the first person they know to break news. So every time a big story comes out, there is often a flood of Tweeters sharing the news with their followers sometimes hours or days after the event.

Tweeter 3: The First Graders

On Twitter, you'll often find that people revert to a time when they didn't know how to spell or capitalize or use proper grammar. Some people write extremely messy and unintelligible sentences, using slang, acronyms, and often slang acronyms without periods or capitals. To call it a mess would be an extreme understatement.

Tweeter 4: The Retweeter

Retweeters are those that rarely make posts of their own, but rather consistently retweet the posts of others. Often these are romance quotes, but they could be any type of post the person finds interesting. While these people may seem advantageous to your business, the truth is that most of their followers likely started ignoring them out long ago.

Tweeter 5: The Justin Biebers

There is a level of worship for Justin Bieber on Twitter that is extremely unhealthy, and if you don't pick your followers wisely, there is a pretty good chance you'll end up with a few of these "Beliebers" on your followers list. They dominate Twitters youth and spam tweets constantly. Imagine the stream of conscious tweeter as a 14 year old girl with a Bieber obsession – its not pretty.

These are just a few of the tweeters you may encounter as you try to market your business on Twitter. There are plenty more that may rub you the wrong way, but youll find some tweeters that are interesting, informative, humorous or otherwise fun, and depending on your industry, you may want to target those individuals specifically, because they are far less irritating to interact with.

Twitter is still one of the hottest buzzwords in social media marketing. Why? Because its one of the most personal ways to target potential customers and spread your message. While some companies stagnate with only a few hundred followers, others gain a huge following because of how they run their Twitter marketing campaigns, and ultimately find that Twitter has helped them achieve substantial success in the industry.

But Twitter marketing isn’t easy certainly not as easy as many social media experts will have you believe. Not every company that uses Twitter is going to achieve instant success. So here are five ways that you can improve your success with Twitter and potentially help your business or website thrive.

Tweet Regularly

You should have someone in charge of your Twitter account that is ready and able to make regular updates. These days, your followers follow hundreds of other people at once, and your presence is often lost in the sea of other tweets being made every second. Only if you’re able to regularly update your Twitter account will it have any chance of being noticed, so don’t start a Twitter campaign unless you plan to commit to it.

Be Interesting

Dont even bother with a Twitter account if the best you can do is describe your lunch or the magazine on your latest flight. “I am tired” is not an exciting tweet by anyone’s standard, and if your presence is too boring you’ll either lose your followers or develop a negative image for your brand. You want to be interesting, so people associate your account with excitement.

Market Your Twitter

For some reason, many people join Twitter and expect the followers to come rolling in. But there are thousands of businesses already on Twitter and millions of people that use it regularly, and no one is going to follow you simply because you are (or think you are) an interesting business. You have to go one step further and market your Twitter account – on your website, your blog, your other social media accounts and more.

Have Special Offers/Inside Info

Depending on your style of business, you should consider having special offers exclusive to your Twitter followers or inside information that isn’t available elsewhere. This will give people a reason to follow you, hoping to find out more about what you have to say or offer. Special offers can also be a great way to create a buzz about your business.

Listen and Respond

Finally, you’re going to have people communicating with you on your Twitter account the best way to make sure you develop a positive image is by tweeting back to them, and engaging in conversations. This creates loyalty with potential customers and shows that your Twitter account isn’t just for marketing.

Running a Successful Twitter Campaign

Succeeding with Twitter isn’t as easy as people claim it is. Thousands of companies launch new Twitter campaigns every day and they crash and burn. If you really want to have a successful Twitter account, you need to make sure you follow the above tips and run your Twitter the right way.

You created the page, added your information, setup like buttons, installed all of the necessary information to make your Facebook Fan Page as useful and interesting as possible to your fans. Theres just one problem. You have no fans.

The legions of fans you need to promote your brand, engage with you on interesting niche issues and ask important questions that allow you to show off your immense intellect are missing. Well, no longer my friend. Here are five simple tips to help you blow your fan count out of the water.

Seed the Fields – People are more interested in something if they think they are missing out. So, get a few hundred fans to start so it looks like you have something interesting other people might like. Fiverr is great for this. You can find multiple $5 gigs that offer between 300 and 600 Likes each. Spend $20 and get between 1000 and 2000 Likes for your page. Most of them wont do anything (often they are shell accounts), but they make your page look more alluring to passersby.
Create a Fan Gate – Interestingly enough, one of the most effective ways to get fans is to block the content on your page until someone Likes it. By implementing a Fan Gate and forcing people to give a like to see what you have (free reports, emails, updates, etc.) you attach a sense of value to your page and if its worth something, people want it that much more.
Integrate with Your Website – If you have a website, you have readers and visitors. Strongly encourage them to Like your page by implementing a Facebook Like box somewhere on your site. If you use WordPress for blogging, you can do this with a simple plugin. Remember, you want Likes on your Fan Page, not for your articles (though both is ideal).
Build a Regular Posting Schedule – Dont just post one or two days a week at random. Post to your Page once a day at the same time. Extras are great, but if youre consistent with a useful tip, link or video every day, people will return to see what you have to offer.
Ask Questions – Ask and answer a lot of questions on your Page. If people see that others are interacting with your Page, they will do the same. No one wants to be the first person to step onto the dance floor. Drag someone out there and the rest will follow. More importantly, it will show that you have the answers to their questions. People want expert guidance – offer it and they will become loyal fans.

Your Facebook Page can be a tremendously useful tool in generating interest in your business, services or brand. It just needs a little kick start. Do these five things and youll be swimming in new fans before you know it.