Why Do I Need All this Stuff?
As soon as you think you have Facebook and Twitter figured out, somebody tells you that you need to be posting on a whole bunch of other places, like Google+ and Pinterest.
You might want to say, “Why bother? I can’t be in all those places at once. I don’t have that much to say, and also my head is going to explode.”
Sure, I hear you, but you’ve probably also heard that we are all media companies now. Clients, customers and allies want to engage us and they want to do it with online content. It’s not about putting out press releases. It’s a conversation. This is a game-changer because the answer to “I want you to make me come up at the top of Google search results” is not simple SEO anymore. Fact is, Google is messing around with its own system right now, manipulating it so that your socially -networked content drives you to the top of search results, not necessarily keywords and all that.
It’s all part of Google’s effort to promote Google+, but it means all that stuff you post to Twitter and Google + really matters. Twitter, blogs and Google+ are dramatically different from Facebook in this way. Facebook doesn’t allow its content to indexed by its arch-rival Google.
Whatever you put on Facebook stays on Facebook and Facebook’s growth is slowing. If you want people to find you outside of the Facebook world, you have to post to other places.
That’s nice. But my head is still going to explode. It’s overwhelming.
Consider that you can only do one thing well. The trick is to pick which one.
Explore Your Options.
Most social media tools are still free. This means you can experiment with a marketing budget of zero. Zero is a good budget to have. The metrics you can grab are really good using tools like WordPress, Twittercounter, Social Report, and others. In the wine business? Check out vintank’s Social Connect. Using these tools you can test, measure, test again and generally figure out your strongest channel in a couple of months.
Examine Yourself.
The knee-jerk advice has always been “write a blog.” Shockingly, however, not all of us are great wordsmiths. Some of us are visual people and others are a little, shall we say, non-linear. Stunningly, we are not all original content-generating machines either. Some of us are hunter-gatherers and others are curators. Okay, for the visual folks, you can post images to Flickr, which is heavily indexed by Google. For the non-linear/visual folks, Pinterest is a wonderful online scrapbook and fun networking tool. Storify allows you to curate content from everywhere to build stories, and Summify builds a team of like-minded content generators who make you look good.
Be Efficient.
Scheduling Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn updates using Twuffer, Hootsuite or TweetDeck is a good way to get your life back. If you need research to sound reasonably intelligent (I know I do) try Google Reader to clip articles, Evernote to organize things and Sparrow to get your inbox to “zero.” Clients who use my application called Red Cup Office to organize their teams can clip their notes right into Evernote. Trello is a virtual whiteboard on which you pin virtual index cards – an enormously useful ap that I am using for three teams now. If you have an iPad or iPhone, Zite grabs what your Twitter friends are posting, mixes it with your Google Reader results, and creates a personalized magazine that I read more often than the New York Times.
Photo credit: Jurvetson via Creative Commons License.
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