Content Creation and Strategy via Digital Marketing Channels, such as Newsletters, Article Writing, Social Media Education/Support, and Blogging, Facebook Pages | Purple Phone PR & Marketing

Are Emailed Newsletters Old School?

I was on the phone with a client the other day and she asked me: “Are newsletters old school?”  And, I jumped in quickly with “Absolutely no!”  As we were talking, it occurred to me that, given all the hubbub about social media these days, the same question might be in the back of your mind too.

So, what keeps the newsletter relevant, as compared to social media?

• It reaches qualified leads.  People have opted to hand over their email addresses to you in exchange for the information that you will deliver.  This signals an increased level of interest on their part.
• It can encourage action.  The social media model can excite and engage, but the newsletter can actually include a call to action, a request that the recipient become even more involved with the brand, perhaps even to the point of making a purchase.
• It allows you to deliver information.  Instead of putting the onus on your customers and targeted customers to seek out your blog or to follow you on Facebook, you hand over the information that you want them to have. 

So, keep those newsletters working for you.  Make sure they contain useful information, delivered in a professional format and they will continue to be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. 

How to Post on your Facebook Business Page as Yourself

The other day, I was talking with a business owner who worked on a business page with other team members.  At one point, she wanted to post a congratulations message to one of their members from her own account, but couldn’t figure out how to do it.  Here’s how:

1. Pull up your page and click the “Edit Page” button in the upper right hand corner of the page.
2. Choose “Your Settings” at the top of the menu list on the left.
3. Next to “Posting Preferences,” deselect the line that says “Always post as page.”
4. Save changes.

Aside from wishing someone well, why might this be important to know?  A couple of the things that I can think of are:

• You want to tag someone who is your friend, but who does not like the page.
• You want to comment on something that the page has posted.

How else are you using this Facebook feature?  Why do you post on your business page as “you?”

What's a Wordle?

I know you've seen these images before - some inspirational, others advertisements, etc.  They are called "word clouds."  What you may not have known is that you can generate your own word clouds using an online program called Wordle.  

I found this out yesterday when reading "4 Great (free) Tools to Measure Social Sentiment and 4 Important Stats" by Nick Bennett.  In the article, he demonstrated the tool by showing the words that he's posted to the Social Media Today site.

How might you use tool to aid and measure your social media efforts?  I bet there are hundreds of ideas, but here are a couple that the article sparked for me:

• Visit a competitor's blog and understand the language that is driving traffic to their site.
• Enter your own site's blog to make sure that you are using your keywords frequently enough.
• Grab the RSS feed from the news paper, an industry journal, or even YouTube's home page.  It'd be the quickest way I know to scan what's happening today.
• Interested in someone on Twitter?  Take a quick look at their blog to get a general idea about the topics that their blog addresses.

What about you.  What other ways could you see yourself using this creative, colorful, and captivating tool?

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(Oh- and my Wordle above?  To try out the tool, I copied the 2010 text from the journal that I keep on my daughter.  The journal contains notes about the clever and funny things she says.  This is ages 6-7.)

Will I Follow You? Rule One: Link Sharing

Earlier this week, I asked how you decide if you want to follow someone or not.  Certainly, there’s the subjective part: are you interesting to follow?  And the answer there is going to change from one person to the next. 

Beyond that though, there are some things that you can do to help ensure that you’re the type of person/account that would be followed. 

Rule One: On Twitter, do not simply dump a bunch of links – even if they aren’t all yours! 

If I check out your account and all you have are a bunch of headlines with links off to articles, I don’t see the need to follow you.  After all, where’s the YOU in that?  If I wanted a source for articles, I’d check Digg or some other similar resource. 

What rules do you go by?  Curious to see what others use to evaluate the “worthiness” of an account.

What a Broom, Coat Hanger and Tube of Spackle Reminded Me about Marketing

The quick setup.  We’re selling our house.  There was a long settlement crack running down from the ceiling to the bottom of the wall.  It had to be fixed.  Problems arose when the tallest ladder I could get was 10’ tall – and the ceiling was maybe 15’ or so.

As I teetered on the edge, not knowing exactly what to do about this, I realize that other things in the house could probably help.  I got the coat hanger, dribbled a hefty amount of spackle on it and ran it down the crack.  Good results, but still not quite high enough.  A rounded broom handle, I thought:  that did the trick!  Spackle all the way from ceiling to wall’s edge!

Climbed on down and was rinsing the broom.  Of course, this was all mid-work day, so my mind was on marketing and I was reminded that . . . 

As a digital marketing consultant, I can tell you anything and everything you want to know about social media, but the catch is that they are simply tools - they are the coat hanger and broom.  It’s the WAY we use them and the IDEAS that we have for applying them that will have the greatest impact, offering you solutions to problems, exciting customers, and resulting in more leads than you can handle. 

What are you doing with Facebook, Twitter, etc. that’s fresh and different?  How are you being creative in your marketing? Show me your out-of-the-box ideas!  (If you’re not doing, you can show what are you seeing – maybe you’ll spark an idea for someone else.)

Using Following To Your Advantage

These days, you can follow anyone, every conversation, and blog posts galore!  Great or not?  Maybe doing that just clogs up the old inbox, causing you to massively delete all messages, negating the reason for following in the first place.

So, how do you pick and choose?  What criteria do you use for click that “follow” link?  I know what I do and I’ll post about that in a few days, but I want to see if I can learn anything new from you first! 

Cool Tool: Cinch

Follow Rachelminihan on Cinch

This week, I’m going to switch it up a bit.  Generally, I prefer the written word: since we’re not all the same, this is a great tool for the talkers of the world to share their ideas and drive traffic to their sites. 

Take a look at the tool, Cinch and listen to my sample.

Super simple and easy for recording micro-podcasts on the fly! 

Give it a try and  post your samples below so I can see how it works for you.

Linking the Employer on your Facebook Profile Page to your Actual Business Page

What a pain.  You’ve gone to all this trouble to create a business page on Facebook and have it represent your business.  Suddenly, Facebook updates it’s profile pages so that your key info, such as your employer, are prominent on your page.  The problem is for many business owners who try to choose their current business page as their employer, it’s not an option and a blank, meaningless page is created instead.

The good news is that with a little monkeying around, this can be fixed.

The essence of fixing this is that every single page on Facebook, whether its a personal profile page or business page or photo, has a number that represents it – a unique identifier.  You don’t see this number too often on the site, because words are easier for people to understand, so the site shows those instead.  But, if you can dig up that number for your business page and then add that to your profile page, you can change where Facebook sends someone when they click the employer link on your profile.

Still with me?  Here are the steps that I was able to use to do this:

1. Make sure that you have either the Google Chrome or Firefox browser and the developers add-on for the one you choose. (Add-on for Google and for Firefox.  These are all free to download.)
2. Open your business page in the browser you are using.  I’ll be using Firefox here.
3. Move your cursor to hover over the “Edit Page” button.  Leave it there.  On the bottom, left corner of the page, you’ll see a URL pop up.  At the end of the URL it says “id=” followed by a number.  This is the number of your business page.  Write it down.
4. Open your profile page.  Click “Edit Profile.”  Choose “Education and Work” from the left menu bar.  It’s time to add that number to your profile.
5. Start entering the name of your business page on Facebook. Some pages will come up and if yours does, great.  You’re all done.  Many won’t though.  For those people, just choose any page.  (Don’t finish typing and Add what you’ve typed – actually choose from the dropdown list.)  Literally any page will do because we’re going to replace the page that you add with the number you wrote down above and this random page will no longer show.
6. Now you need to use the Forms option in your web browser.  If you are using Firefox, you’ll see a menu bar up top.  One option says “Forms”.  Click that and choose “Display Form Details.”  If you are using Google Chrome, you’ll find a little gear-like icon in the upper right.  Click that.  Choose “Forms” and “Display Form Details.”
7. When you click this, your page is going to look really messy with lots of weird words all over.  Don’t panic.  All you have to do is find one little piece of information: look for the line that says “employer_id=”.  Next to it, there could be a blank or a number.  This is the spot where you’ll enter the number that you wrote down in Step 3. 
8. And, the most important step of all – SAVE.  Well, click “Add Job.” Don’t forget this or you’ll have to start over again!

Of course, I make no promises that this will actually work next time Facebook makes changes to the profile page, but at least for now, it worked for me!  (Thanks to Tracey Gritz for pushing me to finally figure this out because it’s been driving me crazy for months!)  If you get super stuck or have an easier idea, please let me know! 

Cool Tool: NutshellMail for Twitter Productivity

I loved Twitter from the moment I discovered it.  Loved it to the point where I'd find myself "wasting" time with it instead of using it for any sort of productive business reason.  Sound familiar?  

The good news is that I've come up with a way to use the tool more productively through the aid of NutshellMail, a Constant Contact product, and want to share that with you.  NutshellMail actually allows you to link several of your social media accounts to it and have updates from those accounts delivered to your email.  You can use it with Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, and LinkedIn.  So, it's pretty robust, but I've choosen to use it to simplify my own use of Twitter and that's my focus here.

Here's the method:

1. Use Twitter to network  (Or another social aggregator: I use HootSuite.) whenever you can for specified amounts of time.  Get out there, meet as many people as you can.  Just see who is around.  Think of it as akin to attending a seminar, company picnic, or tradeshow.  You may never again see most of these people, but there will be a few with whom you develop a relationship of some sort.  
2. Establish Twitter lists.  Instead of thinking of lists as a way to group people of like interests together, use these to group together those people with whom you've established some sort of relationship.  Maybe you find that their posts are super interesting each time.  Maybe you've had some direct communications with them.  Maybe you've met them in person.  For whatever reason, you've begun to form some sort of relationship with the people on your lists.  (Learn to create Twitter lists.)
3. Get a NutshellMail account.  Here's their link: http://nutshellmail.com/default.aspx and link this to your Twitter account.    
4. Customize your NutshellMail account.  Customize your Twitter account to add the lists that you established in Step 2.  And, from the Account Settings tab, set your delivery times.  I receive it 5 times a day, during Twitter's busiest times. (Like I said, you can opt to do more with the tool, but I'm a KISS person and these settings allow to to just make sure that I'm meeting my goals and not getting sidetracked by other social media chatter.)
5. Check your email and RESPOND.  Now, you'll be receiving emails at your scheduled times from Nutshell and it will contain only the tweets of those people with whom you want to deepen your relationships.  These you will read and respond to everytime, but the commitment will be much less than if you tried to logon to Twitter five times per day and read/respond to everything that everyone tweets!

It's definitely been working for me.  I will say that you need to make sure you maintain the lists though.  I made the mistake of getting lax in that and then came to realize that there were people with whom I'd connected and enjoyed who I wasn't actually staying in touch with.

Now, tell me . . . have you tried NutshellMail yet?  Are you using something different to accomplish what I've described above?  

How to Create a Twitter List

A while back, Twitter launched the list functionality.  At the time, I thought that the best thing about it was the fact that when someone else created a list, I could follow it and essentially get to know a whole new group of people at one time.  

It took a while before I got into the spirit of creating my own lists.  I began doing so because I discovered Nutshell Mail and you can use that tool to receive updates from lists in your email.  So, I created a list to try out that tool.  

Turns out, it's quite easy to do:

1. Login to your Twitter account.  
2. Click the "Lists" dropdown from the menu that hovers over the top of your timeline.
3. Choose "Create a List". 
4. A popup window opens.  Give your list a title.  Add a description if you like.  Decide if you want the list to be public, meaning that others can follow your list, or private, meaning that it's for your eyes only.  Click "Save List."
5. Your new, empty list opens up.  Now, you add people to your list.  You can search for people right from that page.  Or, go to the page of people whom you are following.  
6. Next to each person, you see the indicator that you're following them.  Next to that, there is a smaller, grey button.  Click that.
7. All of the lists that you've created will pop up.  Simply check off the lists that you'd like to add this person to.

That's it.  Seven little steps and you've quickly organized your followers.  Now, how you choose to use your lists is an entirely different post.  Would love to know what you use them for though.  Please comment with how you're using Twitter lists.  What value do they provide to you?