If you printed Twitter:
• The paper would weigh 3.5 MILLION pounds- the equivalent of 82 school busses loaded with 84 kids
If you printed Twitter:
• 7 Billion tweets are composed of approximately 104,860,000,000 words which is the equivalent of approximately 133,000 copies of the King James version of the Bible.

If you printed Twitter:
• And spent every workday doing nothing but reading tweets, it would take 2912 years to finish.

If you printed Twitter:
• All the pages of your printing, laid end to end, would stretch 60, 763 miles; equivalent to 2.5 times around the globe.

If you printed Twitter:
• It would cost you $24,500,000 using an average ink jet printer with only black ink. To add the Twitter blue, that total jumps up to $55,606,250.

If you printed Twitter:
• Keeping up with only 26 Million Tweets a day would require 30 Inkjet printers working around the clock to print over 1,300,000 pages daily.

Are you sitting down?
The facts and figures you just read are from 2010. It is now 2011 and those numbers are increasing exponentially EVERY DAY! How big is Twitter? Try it and see.

Image via Wikipedia

Twitter is rapidly becoming one of the most popular avenues used by businesses to build their client base and bring awareness to their services and offerings. Twitter is not a trend, it’s a tool- A powerful tool to quickly connect and bring your marketing potential to the next level.

Here are some figures from just one year ago:

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.
• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.
• Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet.
• Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications.
• Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees.
As of September, 2011, here are some new figures:

• The microblogging service has a total of 200 million registered users
• Some 55 million users log on to Twitter from their phone or tablet every month
• Twitter.com now sees 400 million visitors a month, up from 250 million at the beginning of the year
• Twitter now hosts roughly a billion tweets every five days
• 230 million tweets every day
• The latest new record number of tweets per second is 8,900- set when Hurricane Irene hit New York and Beyonce announced her pregnancy.

That last stat shows the reach and diversity of the power of twitter. Imagine what it could be doing for your business.

Related articles

• Top 9 Twitter Apps For Higher Efficiency (kylelacy.com)
• 5 Twitter Tips to Give Your Content More Exposure (hubspot.com)
• 6 Ways to Capitalize on Twitter’s Promoted Tweets (hubspot.com)

This is incredibly common, and now many businesses who want to use the superior Facebook Page have gone through the frustrating process of suggesting that your friends on the personal Profile “like” your Page. The conversion rate for this process is generally quite low – you’re never going to get even half of your friends to like your Page. Using a personal profile as a brand is actually a violation of Facebook’s terms of service (TOS), and by doing so, you run the risk of Facebook pulling out the big stick and revoking your access. So what do you do?

Now, you can take the business profile and use the Profile Migration tool to set up an official Brand page. Brand pages are better suited for local marketing because they allow anyone to “like” you (no approving friends), all of your current friends will be switched over to fans, there’s no maximum on how popular you can get, and they offer small businesses more robust media and promotion offerings. The fact is, Brand pages are simply the better option. By not using them and sticking to a personal profile, you limit your brand’s ability to really reach out and engage customers.

However, there are some unexpected results that inhibit the functionality of this application.

• It will create a new Page from your personal profile. You do NOT get the option to move your friends over to a pre-existing Fan page.
• The name of your profile will likely be the name of the new Fan page. Changing the name of your profile is also problematic, because Facebook doesn’t allow you to use anything but a “real person” name. And since you can only change the name of a Fan page with less than 100 friends, that’s going to be a major issue for many.

The process is relatively new and some minor hiccups are being worked out, but you can be assured we are staying on top off the progress and will be ready and available for you to make a smooth transition and have all the offerings and benefits the brand page has to offer.

Using a personal profile as a brand is actually a violation of Facebook’s terms of service (TOS), and by doing so, you run the risk of Facebook pulling out the big stick and revoking your access. Wow, sounds a bit harsh, doesn’t it? I mean, really, you’re just trying to make a buck…

Not to worry, there’s a better way to expand your exposure and reach on the big boy of social networks without fear of the big stick coming out.

As a small business owner you want to get yourself set up with an official Brand page. Brand pages are better suited for local marketing because they allow anyone to “like” you (no approving friends), there’s no maximum on how popular you can get, and they offer SMBs more robust media and promotion offerings. The fact is, Brand pages are simply the better option. By not using them and sticking to a personal profile, you limit your brand’s ability to really reach out and engage customers.

With the recently introduced Profile Migration tool, Facebook is making it even easier to have much more functionality and better promote your business to customers. Here is an easy to follow Youtube video that takes you through the process: Profile Migration Tool

Personal Profiles with your Business name are not the Facebook way to go anymore, so make the switch today!

Facebook, has finally provided something that businesses have been requesting for some time: a migration tool to convert a personal Profile into a Facebook Page.

Why would you want to do that? Profiles are for meant individual people, they aren’t suited to meet your business needs. Pages offer more robust features for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures with better communication, more opportunities for expression, and improved relevancy.

Gone are the days of using a personal profile that was setup with a business name and “friending” as many people as possible. The most prevalent issue with this strategy (aside from violating Facebook’s Terms of Service), is that a personal profile has a 5,000 friend limit.

The migration tool allows you to convert that personal profile into a Page, and carry all of your friends over there with you. This is far superior to creating a new Page for your business and “Suggesting to Friends” using Facebook’s admin tool, which typically has a very low conversion rate.

Be aware though, not all content will make the transition. From Facebook Developer Blog “Be aware that when you convert your profile to a Page, your profile pictures will be transferred, and all of your friends will be automatically added as people who like your Page. No other content will be carried over to your new Page, so be sure to save any important content before beginning your migration.”

It’s a smart move to utilize this exciting feature and bring the full power behind the Facebook network to your business. We can help you make the transition and get the most out of your online marketing.

Hiring a [social media] strategist, guru, consultant, or any other title is a bad idea for 99% of the companies I come in contact with.

Now, before someone with that title gets all upset and leaves me a heated comment, let me explain why I feel this way.

Social media is a very small piece of what it takes for the majority of businesses to succeed online, pure and simple. Hiring someone who is a recently name social media _________ is a bad idea, because it’s very likely that person knows little about many of the other tools in the online marketing arsenal.  It takes years of study, trial and error, discipline, and a little luck; to become an effective online marketer.  Do you really want to hire someone who has mastered Twitter and Facebook to manage your online strategy?

If you think you need a social media strategist, then I’m going to make a very educated guess and say that is probably only a part (maybe a small part) of what you need.  Most businesses I start working with are not doing many of the other fundamental things right – so why would you jump into social media?!

If you’re not effectively marketing to search engines and generating qualified traffic that converts, then you have work to do before diving into social media.

If you are not segmenting your customers with email lists, cross-promoting to them and building loyalty and referrals, then you have work to do before diving into social media.

These are some sweeping generalizations, but it boils down to this: you need an online strategist, not a social media __________. You need someone who can look at your business and craft a solution from all the many tools in the online marketing toolbox, not just push you into social media because it’s what everyone wants to talk about right now.

Related articles:

• Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Social Media Marketing (verticalmeasures.com)
• 3 Social Media Myths You Should Be Careful Of (onesocialmedia.com)
• The Big Myth – Anyone Can Do Social Media (charlesheflin.com)

This is my 4-step methodology that can ensure anyone is successful in marketing to social media channels, regardless of which channel is used. If you can master these areas, then you can realize the effectiveness of online marketing!

The Auto DM is a greatly debated subject in the Twittersphere.  Some people don’t mind them, some hate them with a passion, and there is obviously a huge number of people that are using them.  If you’ve attended the recent workshops on my PLET method for Twitter, then you’ll know that I’m an advocate of some of the features that SocialOomph affords (such as emailed tweet keyword searches).

However, I get really burned out on seeing a “nice to tweet you” or “thanks for joining my Tweeple on Twitter” messages. It’s not authentic, and it annoys me; but my purpose for this post is not to debate the validity of the Auto DM. There are plenty of other sites for that purpose, like StopAutoDM.com. My goal here is to show you how to [at least] opt out of the Auto DMs that are powered by SocialOomph:

1)  Log in to Twitter.
2)  Follow @OptMeOut.
3)  Wait for @OptMeOut to follow you back. @OptMeOut will send you a DM to tell you it has followed you.
4)  Then send a DM to @OptMeOut. (You can write whatever you want in the DM, it does not matter.)
5)  After sending the DM, unfollow @OptMeOut. (This way your opting out remains private since you won’t be in the list of @OptMeOut’s followers. We will unfollow you as well.)

Pretty simple!  This will at least block some of the silly messages.  Good luck!

Fortunately, social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook provide some amazing tools to allow recruiters to target potential placements.  We all post such detailed personal and professional information about ourselves in online profiles that can all be easily searched, that means that finding that ideal candidate is (or can be) easier now than ever before.

Time
One obvious issue that was discussed is the time investment required to be successful in social media.  Several of our participants today voiced concerns about the level of involvement needed. My thoughts on the large time investment are this:  if you are spending tons of time on LinkedIn and you know that it’s working, then that’s obviously well worth the effort.   In order to justify the time, you have to be monitoring your social media efforts and quantifying your results.

PLET
I presented my PLET method for using social media, which covers the basics that everyone needs to know if you’re going to successfully take advantage of these new media channels: Post, Listen, Engage, & Track

Here are some examples that I covered for how recruiters can use this methodology:

• Posting information is crucial, and content is still king! But don’t just throw out your job posting like every other recruiter does- find some way to “hook” people and get their interest. Keywords are crucial, but finding your (online) voice and letting your personality show through are important.
• If you aren’t measuring it, then you can’t improve it (or for that matter, know if it is worth your time investment).  Measuring the effectiveness of social media efforts is a must – so using tools like URL shorteners (bit.ly) that allow you to see how many clicks you’re getting to job postings can go a long way towards helping you start to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
• Listening for opportunities is one of the chief ways to take advantage of online tools.  Google alerts to monitor for lay-offs or openings is a free way to extend your ability to know what’s happening.  We also discussed the importance of organizing all of that kind of information, and using RSS feeds with Google Reader is a brilliant way to not only organize, but it will give you the ability to do searches as well.
• I talked a lot about the great tools that Google provides, and Analytics was another one.  Knowing that your site or blog is getting increased traffic from wherever you are spending your time promoting is just as important as knowing if people are hitting your links.  The reason we can be so good at online marketing is because we can measure it on such a granular level!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Joe Hall nailed this concept in his recent post that referenced Bonnie Raitt, and he also has some great examples of how you can get people talking. This is an important step – mainly because you can be extremely savvy about how to use social media tools, but if you don’t have information that is going to get people talking, I think you’re ultimately going to end up frustrated and feeling like a failure.  Just because all these shiny new toys in the marketing arsenal have incredible reach with little or no cost, does not mean that you can take the marketing out of the equation.

We are currently working on a couple of Facebook applications to help spread the word for clients, but what word are we going to spread? Without something worth talking about- why would we even bother to build something like that?  The simple answer is:  we wouldn’t.

Make sure you can “give them something to talk about” before you go jumping into social media.  In my most recent presentations on creating WOW (Word of Web) using Social Media, I always talk about this:

If you can’t speak to me with conviction about what you do, why you do, and why I should want to be involved (or buy your product, or work with your firm); then you have no business trying to do that using social media tools! Online marketing is moving at an increasing pace to a completely online conversation, so if you can’t convince me in a face-to-face conversation that I should work with you, how do you expect to be able to do that online? The same old marketing/advertising tactics are not going to prove very effective.   I don’t think you have to go so far as Yoda says and “unlearn what you have learned,” but I do think that a different mindset must be applied.

Some Great Reading about Social Media and measurement:

• Going Viral isn’t Marketing…
• 7 Myths of Social Media Marketing 2010
• How to Measure Social Media