Social Media To-Do List – FaceBook For Biz & Twitter

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Is it just me or are these four guys about to break out in a rousing rendition of “Kumbaya” (smile)? For that matter, maybe this entire Social Media thing is based on that same soundtrack (smile)? Not sure but I am told by many sources that this is how business will be, and to a large extent already is, done.

I got a call this morning from a friend and colleague, Brandon Wright over at UltraClean Pro. I would call Brandon an “Uber Networker” and one with much loftier goals and projects than yours truly. You may know Brandon as the organizer of the monthly Smoke Out event and the recent Meridian Business Days. Among some of the things we discussed was his latest venture which is a radio show that will be airing on 630AM on Saturday mornings at 11:00AM commencing on July 18. I asked him the name of the show to which he replied “We don’t know.” I suggested that maybe they needed to work on that title a little bit before they went on the air. “We don’t know” don’t tell me much (smile). At any rate it will be about business and will feature actual live business people. What a novel idea (smile).

What was incredible about our conversation was that I had left a message on his FaceBook wall only moments before he called me and I later found out that he did not read the message until after he had called me. Strange forces are at work (smile). We went on to discuss that it would be nice to see some actual business generated as a direct result of our efforts with Social Media, something that neither of us has seen to date. However, we both agree that Social Media is creating opportunities in new areas that, once again, neither of us would have foreseen previously. Oh, to be young again and have the time to take advantage of said opportunities (smile). But, there is still time.

I left the seminar the other day with a pretty extensive to-do list and I have started working on that over the last couple of days. The two key areas that I have been concentrating on are FaceBook for Business and Twitter.

FaceBook: First let me say that while FaceBoook is great for posting stuff, I find it to be incredibly difficult to edit previously entered account information. Not user friendly in the least. My humble opinion and may be largely due to my lack of experience with this tool. However, I did manage to figure out a few things:

1. It seems that you can attach as many business or other pages as you wish to your personal profile. I had already set one up some time ago for NetWorks! Boise but the challenge was in trying to figure out how to get that page to show up. It will appear toward the bottom of my “info” tab on my profile and, with a little finagling of the page settings itself, it now will appear when the “Pages” selection at the upper left hand side column of my Home Page is chosen. Be aware that, any page that you choose to become a “fan” of, will appear on this “page” list. You will also want to become a “fan” of your own page.
2. Membership in groups can be of real importance. I was already a member of one and did not even know it (smile). One of my challenges is that I don’t have a lot of friends on FaceBook and, unlike Twitter, I am not going to go around and invite people that I have zero connection to to be my “friend”. So, I at least started with the group I belonged to and scanned that membership role and send out about a dozen invitations.
3. I have received a number of event invitations from FaceBook lately and I really like the way that they are presented. Much nicer than on LinkedIn and FaceBook at least gives you the ability to cancel the event if needed. I’m not kidding, you can not cancel an event on LinkedIn. I asked them about it and they were surprised. They thought you could but then offered that, if I emailed in a request, they would cancel it for me. Lame (smile). I did post an event on my FaceBook business page and got zero response. I also did one on LinkedIn with some response. However, I did not send out invitations on either. This is going to be a challenge. Visits to a NetWorks! Boise meeting (the event) are quite selective which means that I will need to send invitations out one by one unless I can figure out some sort of tag or filtering system. I know that FaceBook has lists and, of course, groups and I suspect those will be the answers to my needs. At any rate, I will be doing FaceBook events from my profile account not my business page.

Here are a couple of quick links explaining FaceBook for business applications:

Hubspot – How to use FaceBook for Business

Community Marketing Blog – How to use FaceBook for Business

Mashable: FaceBook Pages vs. FaceBook Groups

Examiner.com - Business Networking Groups on FaceBook

Twitter: This section will be shorter. I promise (smile). I have been pretty selective to date on who I choose to follow on Twitter. In my mind, how can anybody hope to follow 10’s of thousands of people? The simple answer is “they can’t”. However, statistically, when you follow someone, odds are probably better than 50% that they will follow you back. The more followers you have, the more chances that your message gets read and, if you have a link in your Tweet, that this link may be followed. And that, after all, is my goal. I know that there are a number of tools out there to “auto-follow” people based on key words etc. but I am not quite ready to go there. I actually like to read others Tweets more than I like to send my own (Thank God  for Tweetlater and HootSuite!) and so I used Twellow to follow folks in the Boise area only. At least folks who have “Boise” somewhere in their name or bio. Easy to use and efficient. It also ranks Tweeple from the most followers to the least. There were 118 pages of folks in Boise with 20 Tweeple per page. I got thru page 32 (those with 125 followers or more) and had to stop before my eyes gave out (smile). The good news is that I rank in the top 20% of Tweeple in Boise. I’m not quite as lame at this as I thought (smile).

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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