Now that Google+ has reached 20 million users, in order to stay in the social media game you’ll have four services to keep track of. Facebook and Twitter are the obvious big dogs. LinkedIn, the business social network, has been increasing in popularity and importance. With a huge number of initial sign-ups and very positive press, Google+ doesn’t seem to be going away. Most speculate that once more people start using big G’s new network and business pages are integrated, even more growth can be expected.

So how do you manage having a presence on four different social networks? There is no universally correct way. Everyone should develop their own strategy. To help find how others created theirs, I surveyed a group of marketers in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area. All of them have a strong presence on multiple social networks. The survey asked which of the big four networks they use, what their strategy was, and what impact, if any, Google+ has had.

With these tips you can develop a social media strategy that works for you and effecively targets your audience of followers.

Facebook

Facebook Usage

With over a quarter-billion users, Facebook is the largest social network. One main difference from Twitter and Google+ is that, for both these networks people have to agree to follow each other in order to “become friends.” This fosters a more personal experience. Users tend to know each other before becoming friends.

The usage chart indicates how people surveyed use Facebook. Personal usage is on the far left in darker colors while Networking and Work is lighter and to the right. This same format is used to show usage for the other social networks. As you can see, most use Facebook for personal, family, and entertainment.

“…when I share things that are more personal or family oriented I sometimes go straight to Facebook.”

“Facebook is more oriented toward keeping up with friends and family relationships.”

“I use Facebook to post more about what I am doing and who I am doing it with.”

Twitter

Twitter Usage

Twitter is a mixed bag of sorts. Usage is spread fairly evenly except for family use. Twitter is the service that tends to “stay out of the way.” They provide a method for you to share 140 characters of thoughts or links with others. The rest is up to you. Even though it is a very simple, limited interface, people often find it the most confusing. Regular users often have found specific ways Twitter can deliver custom news or information to them.

“…I use it as an aggregator of news or stories from reporters/networks I enjoy, bloggers I read, music news I care about…”

“Twitter is just for fun – mostly just follow/tweet my hobbies.”

“(Twitter) has really allowed me to build my personal brand…”

“I often cross post from Twitter.”

People tend to find their own personal use for Twitter. Often times other services feed into Twitter so they may have personal and work topics in the same stream.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn Usage

LinkedIn promotes itself as the professional social network. Its more about creating a network of business associates. People you’ve done work for, companies you’ve worked at. Content can be shared but tends to be more focused to business news or the users related industry. You can see from the usage chart that there is a heavy lean towards networking and work.

“LinkedIn is only about professional networking…”

“I’m not posting entertainment stuff on LinkedIn…”

“I use (LinkedIn) for the forums and to keep a professional network. I rarely find the feed interesting but will regularly use it to see who is reading my profile and to have professional contacts…”

Besides being marketed towards professionals, LinkedIn does not allow you to share photos. One major reason it will always lean towards the work and not personal side of the usage chart.

Google+

Google+ Usage

Do a a Google Search and you will find dozens of reviews for Google+. It combines many features from each of the other big three. So how are people using it? How should you use it?

“Try not to post the same things on each network. Google+ is the only one that may cross that line…”

“Basically it is a good middle ground between Facebook and Twitter for me.”

“…with Circles I can be more precise in who I share with and really tailor content to that group.”

“I think I’ll enjoy it more when I start following the Twitter audience, bloggers, news, companies.”

“Google+ appears to be a composite of the major social media approaches.”

Finding Your Strategy

Your strategy needs to be your personal strategy. Many of those surveyed spoke on tailoring content to your audience. Keep track of who is following you and determine what would interest them.

“Create and build a personal brand through sharing content that is relevant to the audience, while still keeping one main thing in mind: BEING SOCIAL.”

This quote brings up another important point. Be yourself. You can turn off your followers if all you are posting “seven ways to…” or “top five reasons to…” links. Engage your audience. Respond to them. Let them see who you really are while still staying with in the boundaries of the specific social network.

“Be myself and always be transparent. Also, have fun with it!”

“I definitely think transparency is important, but that doesn’t mean post everything all the time. It just means to be aware of conflicting view points and to not get trapped in an echo chamber of similar content and people. This also allows for more interaction, and much more interesting discussion and connections.

So get out there, post, share, and have fun developing your personal social media strategy.

Earlier this month, PV Catalyst Catherine Juon and I had the opportunity to speak about social media with the teams at Zingerman’s Community of Businesses. We discussed ways their businesses can leverage social media to build their online brand and connect with customers outside their stores.

Many of the Zingerman’s businesses had an existing presence in some social media, but were searching for new ideas and inspiration. Based on our own experience and research, we came up with recommendations that could be applied across many businesses.

A few of our top recommendations:

1. Put your users to work: Don’t spend too much time talking about your brand: let your fans do it for you! Ask open ended questions that encourage conversation.
2. Use social media as a place to carry over great customer service: People are sharing positive and negative feedback about your company, whether or not you’re there to react. Address negative comments in a timely manner, and you’ll have the opportunity to reverse a poor experience. You should also address positive comments, thanking people for their kindness and business, and letting them know you appreciate them!
3. Let users ‘virtually’ sample your food:They can’t taste or smell it, so we encouraged their team to post pictures with detailed descriptions so users get a feel for what to expect, and try something new on their next visit! Obviously this piece of advice is fairly specific to restaurants or other foodie companies, but regardless of your business, it’s important to be descriptive in your social media endeavors.

We went into more detail about how to take each of those recommendations to the next level for several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare/Facebook Places, and YouTube), and how to tie all of the different activities together into one integrated strategy. When we left, store managers and marketers were buzzing about user generated video contests, posting for product feedback, and fun ways to use social media to draw crowds for special events.

If you’d like to discuss social media strategies, give us a call!

Dear Hootsuite,

We love Twitter, professionally and personally. It is a fun way to stay connected, an effective way to share good news and to connect with others, and it can be part of a cross-medium SEO and relationship-building strategy.

We have used Hootsuite to manage multiple-user access to shared or enterprise accounts for a while now, and we wrote in 2009 how TweetDeck and Hootsuite are better together. Well, here’s the reason we’re writing you, dear Hootsuite. In the body of that post, we of course shared our passion for TweetDeck and then in comments section of that post, we expressed a preference for a competitor, CoTweet. And, we’re sorry about that, we really are.

You see, when we flirted with TweetDeck it was because of its ability to create lists and segment the Twitter streams we’re following into thematic groups. You do that now. And when we expressed our admiration for CoTweet, it was because we needed to be able to manage multiple users on multiple accounts, and Hootsuite, we think you would admit this yourself, that wasn’t your strength at that point. Yet, in the time since, you’ve really grown, and you’ve made that part simple and added other features that make you the Twitter client we recommend to our clients.

The source of our Ardor: Google Analytics Parameter Presets

Beyond those “keep up with the Joneses” type updates, you’ve really set yourself apart with your Google Analytics integration. We also love Google Analytics, it helps us measure the work we do for our clients, and it gives us lots of web data to dive into and extract value for our clients. And it makes us so happy that you and Google Analytics get along so well!

We often recommend the Google Analytics URL builder to help clients tag URLs used in campaigns for tracking. Well, in the excitement of sharing or scheduling a tweet, it can be hard to remember to paste in all of those parameters at the end. And so, we were thrilled to see the ability to set the parameters as a campaign default when any URL is shortened within your dashboard.

Request – Multiple Presets Please..?!

So, assuming you accept our apology, dear Hootsuite, would you be willing to listen to one pretty-please request?

We love the custom URL parameters so much that we want to use them ALL THE TIME, so we have a request for an extension or tweak to this functionality. You see, we would like to get more specific with our campaign names, well, because we’re hyper about analytics parameters. So, ideally the analytics custom presets would to be configurable at the level of of the account rather than the level of the entire Hootsuite dashboard. You see, if we’re tweeting for ourselves, tweeting for a client, or tweeting personally, we want to be able to use different campaigns to comply with their or our best practices. And, we would prefer not have to remember to reset them every time. We love the “set and forget” pleasure of having the preset there in the first place.

Anyway, Hootsuite, thanks for listening. We sure do appreciate the wise and helpful owl you’re turning out to be.

This week, Twitter unveiled its new revenue model of ‘Promoted Tweets‘. I wondered, what do Twitters 105 million registered users, who make up 600 million searches per day, think of this sponsored advertising that will start to appear in their previously advertisement free space?

To answer this question, I went to our social media ‘listening tool’, Radian6, to take a deeper look into Twitter users reaction to this news since it broke. For this, I’ve hidden the neutral sentiment, which accounts for ~90 of all posts and are generally just links to articles describing the changes, and focus this post solely on the positive and negative sentiment.

It seems most twitter users (78%) that share their opinions on the subject have a positive reaction to it, while only 22% expressed a negative response. Let’s take a look at what some of the good and bad comments have to say:

-

Positive Comments

“Thinking of ways that OCHA (and the humanitarian community) could use Promoted Tweets to aid in the coordination of emergency response”

“Would prefer a promoted tweet in which i search for starbucks and kara thrace brings me a coffee. get to it, twitter”

“I think that Promoted Tweets have great potential to *improve* #marketing relevance: http://bit.ly/cLIbR6″

“Bravo will use Promoted Tweets to engage users on shows and will show some user tweets live on TV #aadigital”

“I really like @johnbattelle’s take on Promoted Tweets and resonance http://bit.ly/aCbuNI”

“Favs are dead. The new barometer of success will be Promoted Tweets. It’s like writing movie reviews and aiming for the box every time.”

“So now which firm will be first to claim paid tweet placement services for campaigns?: http://bit.ly/cdbPtt #twitterGetsRevenueModel”

-

Negative Comments

“Twitter unveils promoted tweets. Great, I start twittering and twitter starts advertising ”

“So far my impression of Twitter’s forthcoming ‘promoted tweets’ – one big pop up ad.”

“I hope twitters new ‘promoted tweets’ monetization scheme doesn’t cut into my earnings for plugging MORT’S DELI IN TARZANA.”

“I’m all for monetization but fail to see how paid tweets can be the answer. willing to look at it in action, but have serious doubts”

“I’d pay twitter for filters. Tonight I’d block Glee, Promoted Tweets, the # symbol, the letters RT, Lost and LOL.”

-

The way Twitter has decided to serve their ads seems very unintrusive, and if they’re actually targeted very well (unlike my experience with Facebook ads so far, which seem to think I’m in extreme need of registering for an online dating site and I should switch my career choice to being on the SWAT team), could actually be very helpful. A Starbucks sponsored tweet telling me which days I can get a venti chai for cheap? I’d love that!

In many ways, Twitter has been an advertising medium this whole time! A platform so well targeted, that it requires the user to sign up, and then seek out each advertiser they wish to follow. Hah, and you thought it was for micro-blogging…

@Moosejaw   consistently writes funny posts, but also push products and promotions.
@MichiganTheater advertises which new movies they’ll be showing this week.
@JoeNBC or @KeithOlbermann give me news updates, but they also promote their TV & radio shows every day
@NewScientist and @PitchforkMedia link me to their website with new and interesting articles, where they make money from ads
@RealTracyMorgan and @JennaMaroneyTGS promote the tv show 30Rock in their tweets

While many of the positive posts were a quick opinion of the idea of paid tweets, followed by a link to an article, it will be interesting to see how sentiment changes over time, and if people continue to complain over the course of the next few months as people become acclimated with Twitters new look. Buzz about this news seems to be dying down already, with the expected initial spike when it was first released, followed by a huge drop off only 24 hours later.

So, what are your initial reactions to the promoted tweets? Do you think it will succeed??

Last night, Twitter announced their much-anticipated advertising model: Promoted Tweets.

Twitter: The Start-up Darling

Most of our readers are already familiar with Twitter, the social networking and microblogging service that people and businesses use to broadcast updates (“tweets”) in 140 characters or less. Twitter launched in 2006, hit its stride in 2007, and became the darling of the start-up world in 2009 when Oprah featured the site on her show, which some analysts suggest resulted in over a million new account sign ups.

Along the way, experts have been speculating about whether Twitter can translate its massive user-base to profit. Up until now, Twitter’s revenue has come primarily from search deals with Google and Microsoft, to allow real-time search integration with their own search engines.

Twitter’s own real-time search engine is a huge part of its draw. Millions of people around the world, including journalists themselves, searched Twitter for live updates about top news events like the Iran Election Protests and Haiti earthquake. Trendwatchers follow Twitter’s “trending topics” closely to determine the “next big thing” (and even try to use it to make NCAA Final Four predictions). The Twitter trend feature, topic feeds, and more are all built on top of its search engine.

Promoted Tweets: A Familiar Song

Now, with Promoted Tweets, they’re leveraging that search function even more and adding a new revenue model to the mix. This service will allow businesses to pay for their tweets to be promoted to the top of the Twitter searches they choose. Sound familiar?

The model is remarkably similar to the paid-search advertising model used by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many other engines. Advertisers choose the keywords they’re interested in, and bid for placement at the top of the results.

Also similar to traditional paid search, a top bid does not necessarily guarantee top placement (not forever anyway). Like Google’s “Quality Score” factor, which rewards ads that seem to resonate with users, Twitter will only promote those Tweets that meet a threshold “Resonance Score,” based on users interactions with the Tweets. Users can interact with Promoted Tweets just like regular Tweets – by retweeting, favoriting, and replying to the tweet.

Twitter says that for now, advertisers will pay-per-thousand-views (a.k.a. pay-per-impression) of the promoted Tweet, but they’ll introduce other bidding options in the future. A Resonance Score based on user interactions almost certainly spells out a new pay model for the industry- pay-per-interaction. Tweets don’t have to link to anything, so the model can’t exclusively be pay-per-click. Pay-per-impression is not particularly innovative, and would leave room for gaming the Resonance Score model (what’s to stop big companies from getting all their employees to favorite their Promoted Tweet to maintain a high resonance score?). I expect (hope!) it will be some sort of hybrid between pay-per-click and pay-per-interaction.

What’s Next

Right now Promoted Tweets are only being shown on Twitter search itself, but there are plans to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners soon. On their blog, Twitter indicates this would include displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in a user’s account timeline, which suggests they will show promoted Tweets in the user’s own feed even if they are not following the advertiser directly.

So long as Twitter exercises restraint, and I imagine they will, I don’t think there will be a huge backlash by users seeing these Promoted Tweets in their own feed. That said, I am curious to see how partners like Google and Microsoft will react to promoted Tweets in the API. Will they accept showing Twitter promoted Tweets in their real-time search results for a cut of the revenue? Or will they block these promoted Tweets altogether? Will Twitter provide a revenue share akin to AdSense with those users who embed a Twitter feed on their own site? (I doubt it.) Will they allow sites with embedded Twitter feeds to block Promoted Tweets? (I think site owners will demand the ability to block specific advertisers at least, particularly if Twitter allows political advertising.)

For the time being, the program is only open to specific partners “that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America — with more to come” and there will only be one promoted Tweet per search results page. As Twitter begins to scale its program, I imagine they’ll run into no small number of challenges. Among the things they’ll have to build for a full launch to the public (in no particular order):

• Advertiser interface for creating and managing an account
• Reporting interface and conversion tracking system
• Broad matching algorithm to ensure that their revenue is not severely limited by the specificity of advertiser keyword lists
• Billing & payments system (not to mention fraud protection system)
• Advertiser customer support team, help centers, etc.
• Impression, click, and (now) interaction spam filters and protections

All that work plus scaling what is no doubt an incredibly complex real-time bidding process (especially considering their resonance score calculation), and it looks like there is a long road ahead. Advertisers spending big bucks will not be as patient with the famous Fail Whale as your typical Twitter user.

I’m running an experiment to see if the social internet is correct in their collective opinions about the Final Four. Are we to trust what the internet tells us? Afterall, it is the medium that made people think ‘Rick Rolling’, LOLcats and the You Tube series ‘Fred’ were cool. There’s a lot riding on this, internet, so tell me what I need to know!

For this blog, we compiled data from the last seven days, scanning blogs, videos, images, mainstream news, micromedia (twitter & friend feed), forums & forum replies and Facebook. A main limitation here is Facebook and Twitter profiles with privacy settings, and when doing sentiment analysis, we hide the neutral comments.

Let’s check out what the internet says…

Duke is winning in terms of number of posts, followed by Butler, Michigan State, and finally West Virginia. Duke is easily the favorite to win, being the only number 1 seed left in the tournament, and they are getting the most attention online.

Butler is getting a lot of attention also, receiving over 83,000 mentions in the last week. If you’re wondering why I chose the color pink to represent Butler, there are a few reasons, the first of which is Duke shares the same team colors, and gets preferred treatment since they are the higher seed. Also, since they are being called this years ‘Cinderella’ team, I thought Pink was fitting. Lastly, since I am a huge Michigan State fan, I thought I would emasculate the opponent just a little bit. As we’ll see soon, there is a lot of buzz surrounding the Butler Bulldogs right now, but much of the talk is about how improbable their run has been, and not people jumping on their bandwagon.

Michigan Sate and West Virginia both have about 40,000 mentions in the last week, far less than Duke and Butler, but total number of comments is not always the most important indicator, especially online where people can say anything they want, nasty or nice, while hiding behind a pseudonym. And lets face it, there is no lack of opinions in the internets. This brings us to sentiment analysis. Is the content of the comments good or bad?

Lets start with the first matchup on Saturday: Michigan State vs. Butler.

Butler has just over twice as many mentions as Michigan State, but only 5,568 (48%) of these are marked as positive sentiment. In fact, there were actually slightly more negative sentiment posts than positive for Butler! They’re a Cinderella team thats had a great run, but people just don’t have faith in them, and rightfully so! Their next game is against Tom Izzo and the unstoppable Spartans, who’s sentiment analysis shows a completely different picture.

Although far fewer comments than Butler, 5,842 (64%) of the mentions for the MSU is positive. It’s close, but Michigan State wins the battle for most positive posts with 5% more than Butler.

The late game on Saturday is Duke vs. West Virginia.

A 1-seed vs. 2-seed matchup. Being the state of my birth, I’ve become a West Virginia fanboy the last few weeks, but it seems very few others have joined me. The Mountaineers have, by far, the fewest positive sentiment mentions of any of the Final Four teams with 794 (52.1%). And then there is the mighty Blue Devils, with a ridiculous 10,349 (55%) positive sentiment mentions. Advantage Duke. Sorry West Virginia fans…

This brings us to a MSU vs. Duke final. Now there is two ways to interpret the data here. Duke has nearly twice as many positive sentiment mentions as Michigan State, but MSU has a higher percentage of positive remarks.

Lets take a look at the mediums which these positive comments are coming from:

Is there a certain media type we put more weight into than others? I’ve always thought of Twitter as a megaphone that allows people to shout fleeting comments. I literally sneeze in 140 characters. The point here is that micromedia is nice, but doesn’t take a lot of brain power or conviction to type anything. Forum replies, although with no character restrictions, are much the same way. People enjoy bickering and arguing online, and forums provide some sort of organizated platform for that to happen. I think blog posts are created with a little more thought and conviction. At the very least, it gives the space to form an opinion and back it up in a space that you own. Given this, lets see how the positive sentiment for MSU and Duke match up through blogs.

2,613 (41.3%) of MSU’s positive mentions come through blogs. Compare this to just 1,694 (15.8%) blog posts for Duke. Aha! The ‘higher value’ positive sentiment posts favor the Spartans. It’s probably worth mentioning that the bulk of Dukes positive mentions (67.8%) came in through micromedia, meaning if my assumption that Twitter posts were of lesser value, then my conclusion is very very wrong.

Although I want badly to make the data favor MSU, it would seem as if the internets favor Duke. In fact, MSU is broken. Raymar is playing with a missing tooth, Delvon Roe has the knees of a fat 80 year old, Lucas is out with a torn Achilles tendon, Allen has a torn ligament in his foot… they look like the team was mugged in the parking lot. But Tom Izzo still has the faith, and I am an Izzoist.

Alright Duke, It sounds like the championship is yours to lose…

I am a big believer that the Internet is a tool that needs to be used more for the good of mankind. Watching the Haiti trauma unfold before my eyes on Twitter and Facebook, listening to the connections between survivors, loved ones and lost ones – it made me think about how the Internet has no borders. Humans all over the world build applications to help others survive disaster. Here are a few great examples that I found:

Connecting Vital Resources to the Haitian Victims
1. As you are reading this blog post, a volunteer organization called Ushahidi is helping survivors connect and communicate with the outside world. Ushahidi is a free open source project comprised of developers from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Netherlands and the USA. Their engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their mission is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. The site is http://haiti.ushahidi.com/. It shows a crisis map – where people are trapped, where food’s needed, and where they need help from police immediately. In addition, they list out what you can do online to help volunteer.

2. Google created an application that can be embedded in your web site to help missing people reconnect with their family called the Google Person Finder.

3. Google also developed a Crisis Response hotline that is providing free Google Voice Calls to Haiti.

Making it Easy to Donate
1. According to Mobile Marketing Watch the Red Cross has raised $24 million and counting from texting. If you have a cell phone you can donate $10 to the American Red cross by sending a text message with the word “Haiti” to 90999. Also, the Red Cross is providing a map of the % of Overall Text Donations By State.

2. Salesforce.com allows you to donate through their site and will match your donations.

3. Amazon.com has added a box on its home page that customers can click to donate to the Haiti Relief Efforts of Mercy Corps.

4. And even missionaries in Michigan, like Great Commission Air raised $15,000 from an email and Facebook campaign. They are now in Haiti helping transport food and fuel.

So please spread the word about these efforts; helping is contagious!

Twitter can be a powerful tool for corporations. Marketing possibilities through Twitter feeds are endless; Dell and Amazon MP3 use their Tweets to promote special deals not offered anywhere else. The NBA, on the other hand, keeps their followers apprised of breaking score updates, such as tie games with minutes left. Etsy, the craft-dealer, notifies artists of cool new craft stores in their area and has scavenger hunt giveaways. These companies are among The Big Money Twitter 12, a list of twelve companies recognized by Slate magazine as using Twitter most efficiently.

The similarities these corporations share is that their Tweets are all pertinent to their followers. They listen to what is being said about their brand or company. They give value to their followers whether it’s via discounts, news alert or helpful hints. Most importantly, they use their Twitter account as a place for open dialogue with their followers. It is imperative to remember to engage rather than just promote. Do you have a vote for an excellent Twitter feed?

As is often the case, when I fall in love with a product I’m not shy about recommending it! Lately, TweetDeck and Hootsuite are in my bag of commonly recommended tools, much to the puzzlement of Twitter friends who are curious about the advantage of using both. Mystery solved! Here’s why TweetDeck and Hootsuite are better together:

TweetDeck manages my Tweeps
Hootsuite manages my Tweeting

Read More

You have heard Pure Visibility beating the social media networking drum quite a bit lately, especially about Twitter and LinkedIn. But it’s only because we get excited about networking technologies that will ultimately help our clients expand their business.

When one of my colleagues first mentioned that I should join Twitter I was skeptical that it serve any purpose in my life. I have two kids and barely enough time in my life to watch TV let alone Twitter about it. Then it happened, over time (even though I rarely made tweets) I started to see the value in Twitter. I was able to see at a glance interesting things my friends were doing, which led to me actually talking to them about it the next day. I’d say something like, “Hey I saw on Twitter you and the family went to the Chelsea fair, I think I’ll take the kids there tonight.” Now I was connected with friends I only saw every month or so, I was a part of something bigger but on my terms. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Still I hear friends and clients not quite understanding why this Twitter phenomenon is sweeping the web. I can be a cheerleader (not a pretty sight by the way) and share heartfelt networking stories like mine, but Common Craft has video that explains exactly what I’m talking about. Take a peek and enjoy.

If you’re a Michigan resident, see how MLive.com uses Twitter to reach out and stay current with its audience. http://www.mlive.com/twitter