Foursquare is the up and coming media outlet. Geolocation is really starting to get pick of and you want to be one of the leaders of the pack instead of playing catch up down the road. Foursquare and other geolocation based networks are important in that they bring social networking to the mobile arena. Smartphones are increasingly popular and these networks take advantage of this new technology. For you, I can see the big benefits of foursquare when working with clients that have a venue, theatre, storefront etc. or someone that is having an event. these networks allow one to create "specials". Specials can be any sort of incentive to get people through the door and increase the number of people visiting the place.
My work done includes press releases, as well aswith their social media including twitter. The should be releasing their product soon, which will allow anyone to create their own free discussion based network.
Facebook is the first social media outlet i used....what was yours? I thought it was a great way to share information and know what people were up to. Ultimately it ended up being away to connect with people you havent spoken to in years. and you never know who could be a potential client. Facebook pages are a great way to build a community and get a dialog going with the fan/potential customer base. The Rootbuzz page is exemplifying a few important keys to branding and interaction. First, we see that the image is taking up the full amount of space given, a profile picture can take up a 200x600 pixel area. Many pages do not take advantage of this free marketing/advertising space. Secondly, Pages are not focussed on the direct sell, but rather on engaging the community. Typically a split of 80% talking about things other than the product and 20% about the product is a good mix. this holds true for twitter as well. We see fun little messages about updates with the company, product and members, giving personality and face to the company.
this is my twitter, i am active in the social networking scene.
Analytics is important in that it allows one to view data about the people visiting your sites. We can see what keywords got them to the site, which is important when considering search engine optimization strategies. By being able to see what pages are being hit, we can make decisions on what content should be shown on home pages and landing pages.
this is rootbuzz's test community, Otaku Pride. It is an anime network. (Japanese cartoons) Online communities such as this can be important finding, creating, and interacting with a target audience.
By posting frequently and engaging users in conversations we have grown th otaku pride twitter following to over 1,700. One marketing tactic that we inplemented was a twitter contest, this was done in december and consisted of giving away anime related items to a randomly selected person each day for a week. This person entered the contest by retweeting a post made from the otaku pride account. We increased the following at that time to over 500 followers, a gain of 300. Also, being posted in twitter directories has increased the accounts visibility and it now ranks on the first page of the twellow directory in its respective field.
URL shorteners are important when the allowable postable content is limited, this means microblogs (twitter) Being limited to 140 characters means that every single one needs to count. Url shorteners let us post links without sacrificing a sizable amount of space and allowing us to say more in the given space. shorteners including bit.ly, su.pr and ow.ly include analytics information in their shortened urls, this allows one to view how many clicks a link got. Hottsuite allows you to view this information alongside your other social feeds, making it a great HQ for managing social media. fur.ly is a new player on the field, released this week. It allows one to bundle multiple URLs (websites) into a single link. This spin on url shorteners makes it stand out from the competition in an increasingly crowded market. Again, we see how we can get more out of less space.
hootsuite allows one to be signed in to multiple social networking accounts and make posts all from one place. It also allows one to schedule posts. This lets me create a queue of posts that will be released at specified time intervals, allowing me to be more productive by not having to lets say send out a tweet every hour or two. I can schedule them all in the morning and move on to other things. Though it is still important to monitor twitter accounts in order to respond to user comments.
Google reader allows me to easily follow blogs and keep up to date on news. Social media is such a fast changing area that it is important to always stay on top of what is current, as it changes daily. Something in the news today: facebook bought 40 million dollars worth of social networking patents. What I take away from this is that Facebook is worried about competition from google since recent news hints that google will be releasing its own social networks. Google also aquired a social gaming company this week.