Social Media for Beginners

I was reviewing my copy of the Social Media Playbook(A beginners guide to everything social!) that was so generously put together by some great people at Eloqua. (Jess3 and Joe Chernov @jchernov) (If you aren't familiar with Eloqua or their work, definitely check them out.)
And, as advertised, I would like to share with you my learnings from the presentation, but I recommend you still take a look at the Social Media Playbook yourself:

TWITTER

· Continue to engage consistently and authentically while adding strategic thinking and planning to your companies effectiveness

· The most important first step in social media is to listen before speak

· Recognize others, cite sources in blogs, reference contributors

· If you are supporting your own company’s information with SM platforms be sure that Twitter/Linkedin Bio’s reflect the employment.

· Less than 11% of all US Internet users visit twitter, with 5%-7% of those actually participating in the platform

· The shelf life of tweets in terms of impact ranges from a few hours to a few minutes

· As you grow, be selective of the number of people that you follow… Stay around 1,000

· Tweets can be 140 characters but try to limit to 100-120 so that if someone wants to retweet it there is room for a comment or personalization by the retweeter

· Reciprocity is the currency of the web

· Don’t be afraid to show personality

· Too much corporate promotion can lead followers to tune you out

· Almost all sites that assign account holders a twitter score place a high value on activity level

· 90% about others 10% about you

· Participate in existing conversations by using established hash tags

· Your organization should also be sure to comment on industry related topics

· Hootsuite-Can schedule tweets to go out on specific date and time… Can manage multiple twitter accounts

· Twubs-Allows you to save capture and archive hash tag based discussions



FACE BOOK

· Internet users spend more time on Facebook than Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and Amazon COMBINED…

· Spike in web traffic due to shared FB links

· FB has yet to offer metrics similar to Google analytics, which would enable Page administrators to gain a deeper understanding of their page’s fans and visitors.



BLOGS

· Your blog should ideally be the hub of your company’s content creation wheel by providing relevant commentary and news that positions you as an insider in your particular industry

· Support colleagues, tweet about it, share a link

· The more diverse, expert and useful your posts are, the greater your chances are to increase leads

· Follow up with a lead with a link to a colleague’s blog as a suggestion to further the relationship

· Build relationships with influencers and leads

· Follow competitors Blogs



LINKEDIN

· 60 million registered users

· The platform allows you to identify the types of connections that your connections have and to see how far away the people you want to get to are.

· Have the potential to rank well for your name in search results



YOUTUBE

· Google rewards multimedia content with a higher search rank



WIKIPEDIA

· The most important reference site on the internet

· 5th most visited website in the US and 6th in the world


Content marketing or inbound marketing, increasingly is becoming a lead generation discipline. Sirius Decisions predicts that by 2015 more than 75% of leads will be sourced by inbound channels