SocialOomph for Twitter Automation
Do you have too many posts, tweets, and status updates to post? How about blog entries, too? One service that can help automate all this posting is SocialOomph.com (formerly TweetLater). It offers free and paid versions. You can upgrade to a professional membership to enjoy more perks, such as scheduling recurring updates and blog posting. The free version is great if you’re someone who has at least one twitter account and plenty of content to share, with limited hours in the day to sit at the computer. Free accounts can post to Twitter, Buzz, and StatusNet. Paid accounts can post to those, plus Facebook, any blog, a blog feed, and ping.fm. You can schedule a reservoir queue of tweets to be posted automatically at a future date and time. Features included in the free version: Save drafts, track keywords, send auto welcome DMs to followers, URL shortening, extended Twitter profile, etc.
The appeal of SocialOomph is trifold. First, no one wants to be blasted with ten tweets from the same person all at once, even if you like them. Each tweet seems less important when sandwiched between six others. By scheduling status updates ahead of time, you can stagger them to give each tweet its time in the limelight. Better yet, you can schedule tweets to hit a certain time zone at the time that best serves your needs. Second, this is great for international posts. A tweet can go out at 3:36AM Eastern (US) while you’re sound asleep; your followers in Paris and Amsterdam will read it as they arrive to work in the morning. Third, for businesses, employees would rather leave their work at the office on Friday. But your twitter account may benefit from weekend activity because many consumers or customers check Twitter on the weekend.
If you’re interested in further helpful social media automation, check out Three Twitter Techniques, John Haydon‘s video on utilizing other services such as CoTweet.
What is your favorite Twitter service these days and why?
Emily Binder
is a social media enthusiast, marketer, part-time web developer, and Etsy baker 
living in Atlanta, GA. She hails from the Midwest and loves chess and rollerblading.
@emilybinder: 
@adoreajarbakery:
For a couple years now, I have found the ever-expanding barrage of applications on social networking sites annoying and distracting. This post explains why LinkedIn users in particular should tread carefully with app integration.
Facebook Provenance
I maintain that I (and most of my generation born in the late 1980s) have a unique view on Facebook. 
I started college in the first year Facebook became a household (/dorm-hold) name. It was summer 2005: I was preparing to depart for my freshman year at college. Ironically, my impetus for FB derived from a high school classmate who began balding at 18. Known for being born a middle-aged Republican man, we joked that Dan had a mild case of progeria (remember that movie Jack? I don’t either…)
Anyway, “Uncle Dan” mentioned his Facebook wall at a gathering, and somehow, already, the esoteric, club-like nature of early Facebook was obvious. I felt it in the air. So I did not admit my ignorance and later looked up this mysterious wall at home.
Flash forward a year- I’m on the Facebook; everyone is on Facebook. And suddenly Mark announces that photos will now be part of Facebook. People were upset. This was an invasion of privacy! Well, at least you knew that only .edu email addresses could register for accounts, so worrying about future employers seeing images of you doing a kegstand were moot.
Eventually, more and more apps arrived. Superpokes (what is a poke in the first place, really?) and then Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc. Causes. Gifts. You name it. All along, I hesitated to allow even basic apps to access my information. Something about clicking that green Allow button felt risky. Or like a snowballing departure from the original point of Facebook.
Despite my heavy FB privacy settings, I still maintain professionally acceptable candor, just in case. But I view it differently than people who were already mid-careers when it hit. I was about 18 when Facebook got popular. It surpassed MySpace and is now Number 1 for social media. My point is that despite having a few periodical schema-adjustments as new apps and new kinds of users were allowed on the site, I still see it as a friends/family social tool and not as one I have to seriously worry about using as a representation of my professional self. (Granted, the internet is the internet. Never overestimate your privacy anywhere.) Alors, the great solution is LinkedIn.
My parents (Baby Boomer, tech-savvy entrepreneurs who work extensively online) recommended LinkedIn c. 2008. I had heard of it but did not yet understand its greatness. The point is that this time, W.O.M. ensured legitimacy, unlike Uncle Dan’s mysterious “wall.” This simply triggered mystique (a la the fascination triggers by Sally Hogshead), but LinkedIn was prestige and power.
In my mental map of social media trashiness formality, I revere LinkedIn as shirts tucked-in, words spelled correctly, and tattoos mostly covered, (or at least tasteful and only displayed at “young” companies). However, LinkedIn does have Casual Friday: you can post your status updates and even share books you are reading via an Amazon application. But obviously, you don’t share cheap romance novels or guilty pleasure reads- you share professionally-relevant content from which your colleagues could benefit. In kind, you don’t post tweet-worthy or Facebook status-worthy content on a LinkedIn status update. It is simply not the venue. Furthermore, no one on LinkedIn is interested in where you checked in for lunch or how you just dethroned the mayor of Starbucks. Back up- what do I mean by venue?
Social networking sites are different for a reason. They are not unique in the ways I have just described so that you can meld them all together and eradicate the point of their specific uses. Chris Brogan is right: Do not post your tweets on LinkedIn. #in exists for a reason. Specify a column in TweetDeck or Hootsuite for Foursquare so you don’t have to actually tweet every checkin.
The theme is that players who joined the game at awkward times have no appreciation for the early iterations, and thus get confused about which new developments to take advantage of, and which to acknowledge as trigger-happy social media miscegenation, if you will.
Disclaimer: The rules of social media are evolving everyday and there is no one authority on how to behave.
is a social media enthusiast, marketer, part-time web developer, and Etsy baker living in Atlanta, GA. She hails from the Midwest and loves chess and rollerblading.
@emilybinder:
@adoreajarbakery:
This post is mainly geared toward Twitter but includes tips for all social media.
Twitter Lists: As you follow more tweeps, organizing them into lists and groups is helpful. For example, I have a list of Atlanta-related tweeps I follow, E.g. local newspapers or venues. I use TweetDeck on my desktop and iPhone, so when I want to view a column about what’s going on this weekend in Atlanta, I can do so easily using by filtering my ATL list. I also have a tech list of tweeps who provide helpful content and news.
But, when I want to search any topic or keyword and see its popularity or stats on Twitter and/or other social media sites or blogs, I branch out:
1. Social Mention aggregates user-generated content from 80 social media sites. You can search a term, name, brand, etc. and filter which sites you wish to display. If someone has tweeted about Carol Bartz (CEO of Yahoo.com), or a blog was written about Steve Jobs, you will see the tweet or blog title and time of post. Tell SM to only show results from, say, Digg, Reddit, Google News, and WordPress= one stream of point-in-time customized social media search and analysis. (Thanks to @wisdeo.)
Salvador Dali- The Persistence of Memory. 1931.
2. Tweet O’Clock is useful if you have an important tweet you hope will grab the attention of a specific user or certain types of users. In the same vein as Social Mention, Tweet O’Clock is focused solely on tracking Twitter users’ (A.K.A. tweeps’) habits. It allows you to pinpoint the best time to DM a tweep by calculating their average most active time on Twitter in a given week. Before tweeting @ someone important, remember this:
<—-Timing is everything: Don’t waste good content on a Wednesday at 3AM. Remember: Monday-Friday, 9A-5P is the most heavily trafficked time on Twitter. And Mondays are the most popular day of the week.
3. Podcasts are amazing. You can make better use of idle time (standing in line, stuck in traffic, riding public transportation, walking your dog) by listening to something educational (or fun). The following are all available for free on iTunes. Two good tech/Internet podcasts to which I subscribe:
- MacBreak Weekly. MacBreak is chock full of the latest tech trends, with a focus on Apple. The podcast is a reliable source for iPad, iPhone, and corporate technology developments.
- 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing. Canadian marketing expert Jay Berkowitz aims to “explain and demystify internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, banners and landing pages.” He gives advice on social media etiquette, with great Twitter tips. His blog is here.
If you enjoyed reading Stephen J. Dubner and University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics, check out their podcast. Human behavior and psychology are highly related to social media. (I was a psych major.) The podcast is bite-size fun.
Pray tell! What is your favorite podcast and how does it enhance your social media arsenal?
Emily Binderis a social media enthusiast, marketer, part-time web developer, and Etsy baker living in Atlanta, GA. She hails from the Midwest and loves chess and rollerblading.
@emilybinder:
@adoreajarbakery:
Regardless of how much you use social media to promote your brand or to communicate with anyone, email is arguably the most direct online method of messaging someone.
Analogy time: Put yourself back in 1994. You would like to converse with your friend Brenda, who lives down the street. You could:
Today, as impersonal as communication can be, directly emailing someone usually takes more effort than a tweet or quick text message. Social media is at best likened to Choice B (with Twitter DMs) or C (with a Facebook Poke, at worst). In the realm of rapid global online communication, a personal email is analogous to Choice A. While tweeting or posting a Facebook or LinkedIn status is quick, easy, and instantly available to hoards of people, email remains more intimate (caveat: namely when emailing a single person, not forwarding messages to groups).
With this in mind, consider how many emails you send each day. Your signature can serve as another promotion tool. While cute quotes and swirly fonts may be appropriate for people looking to personalize email to friends and family, business-related emails can be a powerful method to unobtrusively promote your web presence. I.e., instead of blatantly linking someone to your blog or Twitter page, a small icon at the end of your signature is less abrasive and serves the same purpose. Readers will appreciate how optional and undirected clicking said icon seems: As far as email etiquette goes, you could manually insert links like this: “P.S. Check out my blog here! And follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook here, here, and here…” or you could use WiseStamp, with customizable signatures insertable anywhere in the email.
As Robin Good writes in his blog post on Social Media vs. Email, “My proposition is to look with new and open eyes at the marketing potential that email could offer, as blinded by negative past experiences and models and distracted by the huge momentum that social media is having, we may just be overlooking what is right away, simple, powerful and effective, if only utilized in a more appropriate way.”
Takeaway point: Social media is powerful, but aim to brand yourself with a well-rounded toolbox- use a customized email signature, because Brenda might ignore your page but she has to answer the door.
is a social media enthusiast, marketer, part-time web developer, and Etsy baker living in Atlanta, GA. She hails from the Midwest and loves chess and rollerblading.
@emilybinder:
@adoreajarbakery:
The March 2010 edition of Harvard Business Review, includes the results of a study on the effectiveness of Facebook as a Marketing tool for Businesses, One Café Chain’s Facebook Experiment.
The experiment was based on the effectiveness of a Facebook page for a Houston based cafe and bakery chain, Dessert Gallery.
As with every successful Facebook business page, Dessert Gallery did a few key things right:
Sustainable Fan base
- Dessert Gallery had a large email contact list of 13,270 customers. When they launched the Facebook page, they invited everyone on the contact list to become a fan of the business. That gave them a large fan base from day one. A good guideline for launching a sustainable business page is to have at least 130 fans.
Keep your customers engaged
- Dessert Gallery regularly updates their facebook page with pictures of goodies, news about contests and promotions, links to favorable reviews, and introductions to employees. Social media may be cheap but it’s not always easy. You have to work it to make it work for you.
Put your fans to work
- Dessert Gallery uses their fans to become ambassadors for their brand. Don’t be afraid to ask your Facebook fans to post personal photos of your product and to invite their friends to join your group.
The HRR study concludes:
Cautious optimism seems wise at this point. Companies should see what Facebook can do for them but use it as just one niche tool.
Before you begin a Social Media Marketing campaign, you need to define your goal(s). It’s like going on a business trip. You don’t just show up at the airport without knowing where you are going.
The three most common Social Media campaign goals are:
- Increasing awareness / build goodwill about your brand
- Generate website traffic
- Increase Sales
Increasing awareness / build goodwill about your brand
The Pepsi Refresh Project campaign is a great example of a Social Media campaign designed to increase goodwill. This year, instead of spending big bucks on Super Bowl advertising, Pepsi decided to launch the Refresh Project. There is nothing about this campaign to generate direct sales. Instead, the Pepsi Refresh Project is all about building goodwill for the soft drink manufacturer.
Pepsi kicked off the campaign with a competition between New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, Dallas Cowboys linebacker DeMarcus Ware and New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. Each player campaigned for fans to vote for their project by texting to the Pepsi Refresh campaign or voting online at an NFL landing page created for the competition. The NFL page announced and linked visitors to the Pepsi Refresh campaign.
The Pepsi Refresh campaign features a website, refresheverything.com, which is connected to Facebook and Twitter. Visitors go to the website to submit ideas and vote on their favorite projects. Each project has it’s own page complete with stories, videos and social networking links.
Every month, Pepsi will offer up to 32 grants to worthy projects in six categories: health, arts and culture, food and shelter, the planet, neighborhoods and education. Over the course of the year, Pepsi will award a total of $20 million in grants – about the same amount they would have spent on Superbowl advertising.
The Pepsi Refresh site which launched just over a month ago on Jan 12, 2010, already has 575,000 Facebook fans. The campaign is generating lots of press including features in NY Times, Mashable, ESPN and Time.
