Social Media Tip: Play before Work

This bit of advice surfaced in a discussion at an in-house SEO event I attended last weekend, and I think it merits a note. We were talking about companies selecting people to run their Social Media campaigns and what criteria they should use.  My experience at the car dealership immediately sprang to mind. I selected people who already used each platform.

The best Social Media marketers and salesmen are the ones who are already playing in the medium.

Social Media is not really one easy part of the sales / marketing funnel. It’s better used for building brand-love, and for connecting with fans and customers. Someone who has been on Twitter for a few months for their own purposes knows this. Anyone who scrolls past fan page content on their Facebook newsfeed understands that intuitively.  Casual users understand the culture and the social rules.

I’m following a bunch of authors who get this right. Who let their personalities shine through, who chat with other people. Then, sometimes (and only sometimes), they toss information out there about their books.  This is appropriate. And expected.

I’m also following a bunch of authors who get this terribly wrong. They seem to have a lot of followers, and they seem to be retweeted often, but this is deceptive. They are followed by people who follow-back automatically. They are retweeted by people who use their accounts exclusively to push their own books or retweet others.  No one is reading this. No one is responding to it. No one cares.

If you want to schedule a whole bunch of repetitive tweets that will get lost in the noise and never generate a sale. By all means, build your platform that way.

If you want to actually have fans and people who care about you and your success, it’s time to change the game.

My advice: Don’t try to sell anything – yours or anyone else’s anything – for two months.

Log in every day. Send out notes and @-replies every day. But don’t try to sell anything.  Make friends. This will help you learn how the medium works. It will let you see examples of what not to do in your own feed, because they will irritate and distract you.  It will help you intuit how to improve your own interactions.  You’ll learn the culture.

After two months, you can start selling again, but I guarantee that if you try this experiment, you will change your tactics.

Why I’ve Unfollowed You On Twitter

I enjoy Twitter. This is my umpteenth account, and I really like being able to finally be myself in the space. I’m writing this to “you”, an unspecified Twitter user who just figured out that I’ve unfollowed you for some reason.

I also enjoy teaching people. I want everyone to succeed, and grow and learn. To that end, I’ve created this post for you.  If you’re willing to reform and want me back as a follower, just comment, and I’ll come back. I promise.

What Did I Do?!

Twitter follower numbers turn me into an angsty 13 year old. I want to know what I did wrong. I’m going on the assumption that you might want to know that, too.

First, if you want to see the cardinal sins of Twitter that you’re committing, go run Twittcleaner, and then click the option “How do I look on Twitcleaner?” to have it look at your own feed. See what it has to say.

Even if you do nothing with the report, Twitcleaner catches all sorts of issues:

• inactivity
• tweeting the same link too often
• never retweets
• never at-replies
• ONLY retweets
• posts too many “follow all of my friends” posts with multiple @s
• tweeting only links
• repeating the same tweet too often
• uses ad networks (paid tweets)
• follow back fewer than 10% of their followers
• “all talk, all the time”
• self-obsessed

I use twit cleaner about once every 2 weeks or so (usually after a Follow-Friday binge) and check to see where I stand. I don’t unfollow everyone for breaking these rules, but I do take into account why each of them do so. (e.g. “He’s a celebrity, of course he doesn’t follow anyone back”, or “They are a magazine, of course they link the their own site a lot.” and “Her account is brand-new. Give her a chance to get started.”)

I’m going to caveat this, though. There are other things that drive me batty that are not caught by Twitcleaner’s impressive scans.

Here are additional reasons why I might unfollow someone:

• Salesmen.  I taught a car dealership how to use Twitter without coming off like a car salesman. If they can do it, so can you. Stop selling and start interacting. I chase down the products and books of people I consider my Twitter friends. I don’t do that with people who only promote their wares.
• Overly tweetative.  I myself might fall into this category when I’m in a particularly chatty mood. If people like my tweets regardless of that, they stick around.   I follow nearly a thousand people from all over the world.  Many of them are writers, and chatty. If your pre-scheduled push-tweets show up more often than the faces of the people I interact with, I get annoyed.  I might actually find value in your tweets, and keep you around for a while. But secretly, I’m seething. Eventually. I will unfollow just to save my teeth from further grinding.   There is no rule of thumb on how often is “too often”.  I personally feel that @replies – because they don’t get spewed out to everyone all of the time – are an exception, and that’s where I go tweet-happy.
• The Gurus.  There are some very nice people in my Twitter feed that I like as human beings. I want to support their endeavors. But they are novices tweeting as experts. Writing Tips should come from editors, publishers, and writers with some books under their belt. Neil Gaiman can tell me how to edit. An unpublished novice who has no more experience than me? Um. No thanks. And if you do this all the time? I’m going to unfollow you.  Being inspiring, encouraging. These things will make me happy with you. Acting like a voice of authority when you have no authority? That makes you the bossy kid on the playground.
  • I want you to notice that I’m writing this from a subjective point of view. I’m stating, in this post why I, personally, unfollow people. What is true for me is often true for other people. I’ve run over 20 Twitter accounts, so I’m fairly aware of the way the tool works. But I’m not claiming to be an expert. I’m stating my opinion. You might consider using this as an example of how to give advice.
• Hash-o-matics. Twitter hashtags have a variety of formal and informal uses. In my opinion, none of them are wrong, but some are misused.
  • One informal use is to smash a snarky comment or punchline into a hash and use it for comedy. I’m fine with this, honestly, as long as it’s not overused. I often think it’s funny. I use it occasionally (though I’m often not all that clever).
  • The formal purpose is discovery.  The reason Twitter created the function was for people who don’t know one another to connect. People will search on a hashtag, or click a tag to get an aggregation of all of the tweets including that tag. This is how chats work. The tag combines all of the tweets for everyone taking part in the chat.   This is also how people with similar interests discover one another. Popular tags like city names, team names, or activities like #amwriting are great for this.
  • Here’s the problem scenario:  I’m going to talk about the #book I #amwriting. It’s a #sci-fi #novel that is a #dystopia set in the #future.   Do you see how hard that was to read?  It’s even harder when your interface turns them all hyperlink blue.  When added to a tweet with a link, my brain screams SPAM!   When this is the only style of tweet you send? It’s a turnoff. Hashtags are for sprinkling on the 1-2 most important words in a tweet. They are the categories you want that one tweet to fall under in the massive index of tweets.
• *YAWN* Twitcleaner can’t tell if you’re boring. I don’t unfollow people when they offend me. I’m a big girl, I can take it.  I’d rather be offended by you than bored by you, honestly.  If you are a one-topic, one-trick pony, SNORE. If you use twitter as your personal whine-stream and only that, I will unfollow. (I’m okay with bad days and complaints, we all have them. Just not exclusively bad days and complaints.)
• Unresponsiveness.  I don’t mind the automatic DMs welcoming me. I don’t love them, but they don’t annoy me like they seem to do a lot of people. I do write back to you when you DM me, though.  And I judge you if you don’t reply. Harrumph. This is not an automatic unfollow, but it is noted in case you continue to rack up negative marks.  I will also attempt to engage you via @-reply. If both of these attempts fail to prove that you are a human being using a social media account, I’ll be seeing you later.
• ALL CAPS. I get shouty when I get excited, and we often use CAPS for titles due to lack of italics. But if your whole feed has the caps lock on… no thanks.

Look, I originally followed you for some reason. I liked you enough to click “follow” to begin with, but after seeing you in my feed for a few weeks, it’s time for me to go.

If you have honest questions, if you’re interested in learning more, please comment or contact me.  I am happy to help people who want to learn.   Internet marketing is my day-job, after all.

PS: this post from Rascality about “Good reasons to follow and not follow” folks on Twitter is very useful about making that tricky decision from the get-go.

SO MANY DRAFTS

I have at least a dozen posts in draft form right now. I am still wrapping my head around all of them, and they are each special little snowflakes that demand a little extra attention.

Sneak peek, kittens!

Here are the working titles / topics of some of those drafts:

• My big Twitter goof and how I’m going to fix it
• Social media pro-tip: Use all the buttons
  • Use all the buttons on Twitter
  • Use all the buttons on Pinterest
  • Use all the buttons on Facebook
  • Use all the buttons on other sites
• Why do I post my blogs at 11:00 AM?
• Amazon SEO – How to get your book to the top of amazon’s internal search
  • Case study (I found a guinea pig who will give me real data!)
• Amazon SEO – What’s missing in ebook discovery and where publishers should be pushing
• Amazon SEO – Tips and tricks using Google, Bing and other tools instead
• eBook futures from a web geek perspective (looking at non-fiction to predict fiction)

Aren’t you tantalized? Isn’t your interest piqued? Don’t you want me to get off my butt and write these?

Yeah. No kidding. Me too.  Schedule me some time, will you?

Twitter: Challenge Accepted

I’ve been using Twitter for a very long time. A new thing I’m seeing people doing – just in the past few months – is welcoming and thanking new followers.

People have been doing this poorly with smarmy automated DMs forever, and I’ve always hated it. Now they are sending open @-messages to new followers – either en masse or one by one – and saying hello. When you look at these people’s profiles it just says @soandso Thank you for following. Over and over again.

Signal and noise, people, signal and noise. That’s not polite. It’s generating static.

While it’s always nice to say thank you, I find this sort of a disservice to the rest of my feed.  It can clog the airways, and make things seem disingenuous. I don’t thank new friends on Facebook for being my friend. I don’t thank new Linked In connections (unless it was really a stretch).

What I find a little more interesting and entertaining is to tell people what it was about their profile that made me follow them. It gets the introductions going. But I don’t do it with everyone, just intermittently. I also like to just start talking with them and getting to know who they are a little. I start using Twitter the way it’s meant to be used – to converse.

I posted a few weeks ago that I’ve been projecting my Twitter growth. I’m actually growing my following on the @A_K_Anderson account faster than I’d anticipated. Today’s follower number wasn’t supposed to be hit until this time in February.  I think this is partially momentum, and partially the idea of using the tool well.

Here is a really good article from Buffer on Twitter habits that I agree with fully. To sum up:

1. tweet often, regularly, and to a variety of sources
2. endorse others publicly and thoughtfully
3. focus your topics
4. limit your time on Twitter
5. post at least one non-link, thoughtful tweet per day
6. use the follow button
7. create list of mentors to observe.

I like all of these habits, and I think we should all consider them a necessary part of Twitter use.  I’d add a few more:

• Link to yourself only once per day unless it’s part of a conversation (this includes blog links and self-promotion)
• Retweet at least two really good, useful posts per day
• Use tools to schedule your tweets during offline times (when you know your audience is still active)
• Set up Google alerts around your area of interest to find new, interesting things to tweet to your followers. This is a great way to get added to daily roundups, and a way to be seen as a valuable person to follow
• Start – and keep up – conversations.

More on this later – I’m still working on larger ideas. I just wanted to share these insights because I had them rattling around in my head today, and I’d forgotten to schedule a post this morning.

 

Mission deadline has changed, a bit.

Technically, yesterday 1/15 was the original deadline for my author platform Mission. The deadline was set because it would mean a rejection from the publisher I’d submitted my novel to in October. However, this date is no longer valid.

Harper Voyager got over 4500 submissions, and haven’t had a chance to read / respond to everything by now. So, they have decided to respond to all submissions.

I’m glad I Googled this question before I tweeted the publishers to find out whether there would be some sort of “all clear” sent out.

I am going to hold off – still, more, again – on another re-read, another edit, another touch of Salvaged before I start agent queries.  Frankly, I’ll be too busy refreshing my inbox.

 

Data analysis and creative hunchwork

Last week someone asked me what SEO was in a tweet. 140 characters is almost short enough for me to use my cocktail party line: “It’s magic.”   I use this in a tongue in cheek way to avoid really technical conversations with drunk people. I’m quite capable of explaining SEO in simple terms.

( Here’s my real answer:  ”My goal is to get targeted traffic to my website. I do that by aiming to get my website to the top of search results for certain keyword phrases. I have to know which phrases I’m going after to bring the right traffic to the site. I have to make sure my content answer the question We have to ensure that the back end code is honest and clear about the fact that we answer the question better than anyone else online.   It’s a combination of data analysis, understanding web architecture and design, content planning and quality content.”)

But because it was twitter – and that mouthful is no tweet  - I summed it up using the phrase “A combination of data analysis and creative hunchwork”.

Because I work in numbers and data, I understand how important it is to know which numbers are important.  Remember word problems in high school math class? Do you remember the ones that had insufficient information included to get to an answer?  How about the ones that had a whole lot of extra information to confuse you?  That’s what we’re working with in terms of metrics.

Here’s what I mean – specifically in terms of my Author blog and that work.

The Known

The things that I can measure – the things that I know about my nascent author platform – are all over the place. They are part of both sides of that word-problem coin.

• How many people follow me on Twitter?
• What’s my Klout score?
• How many fans do I have on Facebook?
• How many people visit my blog?
• How many people click more pages in my blog?
• What’s the most popular page on my blog
• What search terms are people using to find me?
• How many pinterest (google + etc) followers do I have?
• What countries do my visitors come from?

Then there are the ways I measure myself and my own activities…..

• Should I unfollow / follow people on Twitter?
• How many blog posts have I written?
• How often do I tweet / post on facebook / pin on pinterest?
• How many words have I written today?
• How many contests have I won
• How many clips do I have
• How many queries have I sent (rejections have I gotten)

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The list of online and offline metrics available is very, very long.

The Unknown

The next set of metrics are the things I can not measure. The things that float in the great unknown.

• Why did those three people unfollow me on Twitter today? (WHAT DID I DO? COME BACK!)
• How many queries will I have to send out to get a Yes?
• How many drafts?
• When is my “good enough” really “good enough”?
• Why does Google show THAT photo of me when I search for my pen name?

This list, I’m afraid, is even longer than the mind-boggling list of the knowns.

Sifting the Wheat from the Chaff

I was inspired to write this post because of Jan O’Hara’s  Sexy Numbers blog post at Writers Unboxed.

Jan is 100% correct. I just want to expand upon and elucidate a few of her final points.

The fact of the matter is that you’re going to measure your progress.  If you are trying to improve or grow, you’re going to be watching numbers somewhere.  Embrace that fact, and then learn how to decode the word problem for only the information you need to solve the problem.

Here are the real tricks of the metrics trade:

1. What is the real goal of your work? What are you actually seeking to improve?  In SEO terms, my goal is traffic, not search engine rankings. I don’t care if I rank 304, if people are clicking on my links.
2. Determine which metrics are meaningful in obtaining that goal. Back to SEO: I track visits to see if people are finding my links, I track page views to see if they like the site when they get there. 
3. Determine which metrics you can safely ignore.  I don’t track my rankings on search results pages, because they are clouded with personalization, diluted with lack of data due to keyword unavailable metrics and secure search, and because they don’t matter.
4. Are there any measurements that are a means to an end? This is the tricky one, and the one that trips a lot of people up. I actually do look at ranking reports – not to track, but to focus my efforts. If I see that I’m ranking top of page 2 for a term, that term becomes a “quick win” that I can focus on for easy gains.  I don’t track these numbers – I use them.

For my 2013 goals on my author platform, I don’t target a real number of twitter followers. I target a ratio of who I follow against who’s following me.   This measure indicates a reach that extends beyond the immediate circle of influence. It indicates that I have something to offer.  Until I get there, I need to keep tweaking my strategy. That ratio falls in the fourth category.  In fact, because my platform project is so very new, almost all of my goals fall in the fourth category.

What do you track?  What can you stop caring about?

 

Deadline is looming

The original mission deadline is next Monday, January 14th.

• Monday / Weds update here: I’ve slipped over the holidays on this blog and these updates, mostly because there’s very little to talk about until I get into the tactical side of things, and I need to pull my thoughts together a bit more on those.
• 2:1 ratio on twitter: that’s going to take a while. I’ve been making strides, but I’m following a lot more people now.
• Average of 10 blog PV per day  - Check:

Average per Day

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Overall
2012					6	1	0	0	1	47	7	12	10
2013	29												29

• Pretty consistently getting a blog link in the top 10 of non-personalized search results (next step, a G+ call out?)
• And Klout score remains over 60, which was my target.

 

Projecting 2013 Twitter Growth

My Twitter following over at @A_K_Anderson has gone up 45% from December 5th to December 31st.

If I continue at my current, rather steady growth rate (including losing 2-3 followers for every 5-10 gained when they realize what I actually look like in their Twitter feeds), I estimate the following numbers for 2013:

• March 31, 2013 – 450 Twitter followers (that means I’ll have to double my current numbers in the next 3 months)
• June 30, 2013 – 700 Twitter followers
• September 20, 2013 – 1000 Twitter followers
• December 31, 2013 – 1200 Twitter followers

Though my more modest goal for 2013 is closer to 600-800 Twitter followers by the end of next year, if I maintain current growth patterns, I should double that amount.

I’m not ready to spill the beans just yet, but I’m taking careful note of where that growth comes from. I’m planning on sharing HOW to create that kind of growth organically (and strategically) in 2013.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure

Before we start working on that though, do you have any notes from 2012 about your Twitter numbers? If not, you should start keeping track for the upcoming year.  Try this:

Weekly:

• Each week (I do it on Weds) note the date and the number of people you’re following as well as the number following you in a spreadsheet.
• If the number changed significantly from the week before, go through your “connect” tweets and your feed and see what happened.  Were you retweeted? Did you use a specific hashtag? Did you get into a conversation with someone with a lot of followers? Were you added to a list?   Make note of these things in your spreadsheet as well.
• Did you do anything on other platforms to promote your Twitter account? (If so, mark that down as well, regardless of whether it worked or not).

Quarterly:

• Using Excel’s predictive formula to trend your growth, drag your earlier weeks’ growth into the future to see where you might expect to end up at the end of the next three months (this is a linear trendline function, you’ll have to google how to get fancier trends. I generally don’t bother, as I’m just trying to get a general idea.)
• Run Twitcleaner.   Run it to unfollow accounts. (I don’t take their word for it wholesale, do go through each suggestion or you might unfollow your mom.)  
• Then run it on your own account.  Take their suggestions to heart – they use known standard best practices for keeping a successful Twitter account going. 

2013 goals for SEO and my Author Platform

Because I’ve got some goals that are tied to long-term plans surrounding the author platform, I’m going to cover those first.

I still agree with the original goals that I set up through the beginning of 2013, so I’m going to start with those and expand on them. Klout is fine, and the first page spot for my author name looks secure. I’m okay with a #7 ranking. I just wanted to be on there somewhere.

Twitter goal for @A_K_Anderson will continue to be a 2:1 ratio. That means I want to have 2 people following me for every 1 person I follow by December 31, 2013 (this equates to roughly 600-800 followers, depending upon how many I am following).  I’m going to put it out there that my big goal for twitter gains is going to be influencer reach-out and marketing. We’ll see how that goes.

Blog goals for the Author blog will be to average 20 page views during the week on the blog (10 page views on weekends); Average 2 comments per post.  (Page views are a tad higher than visits, as a measurement, but that’s what I’ve been using all along.  The blog will need some continued work:

• daily posts, of course, are necessary
• need sample works, excerpts, freebies
• I will need to update the designs and make it more visually appealing
• and of course, I need to use more photos in my posts
• I’d also like to target at least 10 SEO visits per week to get exposure to people via search instead of Twitter

Other social goals for the Author platform include maintaining weekly posts on Facebook, continuing to build reach and get the word out. I am not setting fan-number goals for that one though, I will let it grow naturally for the time being.  The same goes with Pinterest. I’ll keep using it and maintaining natural growth, but it’s not a target area. I know that both Facebook and Pinterest are powerful engagement tools, however, at this stage in  the game, I have very little to engage users.  For now, I’m content to let those areas just grow organically to support everything else.

However, I do need to pay more attention to Google +. I would dearly love to have an author callout, to be a recommended person to follow, to get some exposure on Google as a viable marketed entity. It will take effort (because G+ is sort of a pain, and not something I do for fun), but I think it could have bigger long-term impact.

Now, for the SEO goals.

One of the things that I added to my 2013 list was to “Come up with a speaking topic for a conference and pitch it.”   The more I think about it, the more I believe that this might be around building an author platform. About creating a brand from scratch.  This might have authors as a target audience, with social media and website advice, and offering ideas for time management and prioritization.   It might also be retargeted at social and SEO folks to show – what – concentrated application of best practices and net effect?  To show new tricks I learned along the way? Or to show that you don’t have to be marketing anything to build a brand.

I’m also going to focus on some of the SEO basics stuff. I’m going to build a page on this site that is evergreen based on some of the presentations I’ve created in the past. I might even make it an eBook.  I’ve got a few speaking events in the near future, so I’ll be able to use some of the same information for all of these.

Ruminating on 2013 goals

I’ve blogged about this personally, but never professionally. I am one of those weird people who desperately need goals in order to succeed.  I don’t just think they are a good idea. They are vitally necessary to the way I think and work.

To that end, I spend a lot of time working on setting them.  They need to be flexible. They need to be challenging and interesting. They need to be time-bound and easy to measure. They need to be written down where I can check in against them. They should represent incremental steps toward my longer-term goals.

My long-term career plan is simple. I will continue working in SEO and internet marketing until I have established enough of a foothold in the fiction world to write creatively full time. This requires paying off debt and making sure my husband’s career is stable.  It probably means moving house so I can have a dedicated office space.  I might freelance or consult in internet marketing in the intervening years (it does pay the bills, and I do enjoy it).  I don’t plan to spend the bulk of my time doing it, except that I will be using the skills I’ve gained in my own creative pursuits.

That’s my career plan – no definite timeline set on that yet. At the very least, that will take 3 years to achieve, my guess is closer to 5-7 to get everything aligned.

 

It follows that the most important of my professional goals should support this plan – which means building a strong author platform for myself while I work on getting Salvaged published. (It so happens that this is also one of  my personal goals for 2013 – which have already been posted over on the other blog.)

Of course, if I’m realistically looking at staying in my current area of expertise for the next 3-7 years, I’m going to have to keep up. I’m going to have to stay on top of my game. I’m going to have to continue growing and learning with the industry.

One of the aspects of living a balanced life is to use our strengths every day. If you haven’t taken the VIA strengths assessment, I really recommend it.  Two of mine are teaching and learning. I tend to learn easily and am hungry for new information, so that one doesn’t require extra work.  I am targeting “teaching”, because that requires me to go a bit out of my way.

I’m looking at doing a virtual career fair as an SEO expert for some Tech HS students in the next few months.  I’ve been talking with a friend about doing a webinar for NAWBO about SEO.  Those count as teaching, certainly.

One of my other personal goals is to ”Come up with a speaking topic for a conference and pitch it.”   I’m not sure whether this idea will be for internet marketing or science fiction writing. I kind of want to pitch an idea for a creative conference – a writer’s conference or a sci-fi convention – something to get my name in those circles a bit more.   However, I very well might come up with something for an internet marketing conference instead.

I will be able to post my goals toward the author platform – those are a separate subset.   What I’m wondering is whether I  should be looking at any other areas? Should I try to build this blog and twitter account more? (Or will I be getting rid of it eventually anyway?)  Should I work on my portfolio? Get more Linked-In recommendations?

Still not sure. What do you think? What are your professional goals for 2013?