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My Top iPhone Apps for Social Media Marketing

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

It’s a little ironic that I’m writing this post about iPhone apps using WordPress on a Motorola Droid (Devour actually), but it allows me a chance to experience how hard it is to blog, using a tiny tiny tactile keyboard and also finally get this post started. Ah, back to a full sized Logitech keyboard and mouse. Much better. Popularized by iPhones, there are apps for just about everything, including tools to help social media marketers on the go. In fact, there are over 100,000 iPhone applications to choose from. Many of those apps are extensions of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Others serve as productivity tools for more efficient social web participation or for content creation. As a content marketer that is also a big fan of social networking and sharing, here are a few of my favorites: Echofon – Twitter usage on iPhones must be out of this world and while there are many great apps for Twitter including Seesmic, Hootsuite, Tweetie and Tweetdeck, I like EchoFon the best. It’s amazingly easy to switch between multiple accounts, its fast and there’s an auto-complete feature when typing in Twitter handles that saves a lot of time.  It works with lists very nicely but does not offer scheduled tweeting, which I don’t personally use much anyway. Facebook – I probably use Facebook more on the iPhone than through the web site. Personal social networking or networking as an individual on Facebook is pretty easy to do with the app. What I’ve pictured below is where I also get a lot of productivity, which is being able to manage our blog’s fan page. We’ve gone from about 80 to over 1,400 fans in about 3 months and the convenience of adding to discussions via the iPhone has a lot to do with that growth. Foursquare – You know those social media shiny objects that you’ve come to avoid but then they gain so much momentum and buzz that you have to try it out and then you end up liking them? That’s my Foursquare experience. It was the same with Twitter. Using Foursquare for marketing as an individual isn’t as obvious as what one might do with Foursquare location based advertising. However, it can be pretty handy at conferences and events for announcing/leaking certain kinds of information. As a retailer or other business with a brick and mortar presence, can you imagine how useful it would be to know who your most active consumers are that are also active on the social web? LinkedIn – While I’m not always by a computer (can you believe it?) I almost always have my phone with me and that makes accepting LinkedIn invitations (or not as you can see below) easy to do. Status updates are easy to do and can be seen by as large a social network as you care to develop. Thus the LinkedIn iPhone app makes it easy to feed that network. Quality trumps quantity here by far. UStream Live Broadcaster – Capturing live video and audio plus the ability to poll viewers and promote on Twitter seems like a fantasy app for a social media marketer. Especially when you’re at an event and you want to capture something and get it out immediately. It’s amazing how easy the UStream iPhone app (U Broadcaster) makes this process. Flickr – Capturing and sharing images is an essential part of digital asset marketing and social media marketing. The Flickr App makes it pretty easy to upload and manage images taken with your iPhone. Google Buzz – Privacy issues aside, there’s plenty of buzz about Google Buzz and the only way I’ll use it is on my iPhone.  Let’s face it, with Google’s dominance and momentum, you can’t afford not to stay on top of their obvious efforts to become a social media powerhouse. It’s not exactly a standalone app though. However, Google makes it easy to add a bookmark to Buzz on your iPhone from Gmail so you can use it directly. Update via Mashable : Apparently there’s a new app called Buzzie for Google Buzz on the iPhone. AudioBoo – This is a handy tool for capturing and promoting on-the-move podcasts. It’s really a no-brainer except when you’re like me the first time I interviewed Vanessa Fox for a podcast and held the iPhone right side up, which for podcasting with an iPhone, is upside down since the microphone is on the bottom. Doh! AnalyticsApp.com – What good is marketing online if you’re not MEASURING? For those with Google Analytics implemented on their sites and blogs (who doesn’t?) this app gives you insight into all the details of web visitor data you’ve come to love with GA. Are these the bestest, newest and most awesome iPhone apps for Social Media Marketers? For this marketer, the apps I’ve listed above take care of 90% of my mobile social media needs. In fact, 4 or 5 would probably do the trick.  I do wish there were more social media monitoring iPhone apps though. Especially those that offer Social CRM functionality with your contact list. I’m also keen on finding task management apps that work well with Outlook. What are your favorite iPhone apps for social media marketing?

A Pay-Per-Click Advertising Crash Course

Posted by under Pay-Per-Click

Pay Per Click Advertising Whether you are here to learn Pay Per Click from scratch or to get a few proven tips and tricks on how to improve your existing ppc campaigns, it’s time to venture in to the world of pay per click advertising. Pay per click marketing or “ppc advertising” seems so easy at first, but many entrepreneurs and marketing people will soon realize that it’s a struggle to achieve a good return on investment. In this article you will get a proverbial crash course in PPC. I will explain pay per click marketing, give you some do’s and dont’s and you will also find money saving tips and suggestions on how to insure that your pay per click experience goes smoothly. What Is Pay Per Click? At the basic level, pay per click is the fastest way to bring ready-to-buy customers to your blog, website, or article. You pay to place your ppc ads high on the results pages of all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN (Bing) and Ask . PPC advertising is effective because it matches searchers who are looking for what you sell with website pages that are prepared to pitch your products or services. You should (if you manage your PPC campaigns correctly) see dramatic results in as little a a few days for a fraction of what it costs to place ads in traditional media like magazines, radio and television.. How To Pay Per Click Marketing your products & services through pay per click is easy: You develop a list of keywords representing the products or services that you’re selling. You write targeted ads matching those keywords and upload the ads, keyword lists, and bid prices to the major search engines. Your ads appear in the sponsored links sections when a potential customer performs a search using those keywords. Searchers click on your ads and are directed to the most relevant page of your website, where you can captivate them with a great offer and turn them into a paying customer. . Read on to discover how to pay less, convert more ppc visitors into buyers, and create a profitable marketing channel for your business. Pay Per Click Search Engines There are hundreds of Pay Per Click Search Engines that you can buy traffic from: Google, Yahoo, Bing, MIVA & Ask are just five examples. This number is increasing, and it’s becoming more difficult to determine which ones are worth using. That’s where my Top 2 Search Engine list comes in handy. I’ve narrowed down this huge list down to my favorites based on my own experience, ROI, and feedback from other pay per click advertisers. 1. Google Adwords: Google AdWords is the largest and most popular of all the pay per click search engines. In fact, it’s in a class all its own, with an index reaching over 10 billion web pages and 100 different language versions. Google provides great tools to help advertisers, including Google Analytics which is integrated with AdWords to help you discover which keywords perform and which you should cut. Again, Google is the biggest and best for volume, traffic quality and user interface. However, it’s also the most expensive. 2. Ask Sponsored Listings : Businesses large and small are aggressively looking for ways to bring more customers cheaper to their site. Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) is a great way to reach qualified consumers for less per click. You can attract quality traffic through ASL’s network which is comprised of over 100 search sites, meta search sites, portals, lifestyle, technology, travel and business sites. Some examples of these properties include sites such as Ask.com, Excite, evite, Match.com and Gifts.com. A Pay Per Click Marketing Secret Ask Sponsored Listings is a great resource for businesses and entrepreneurs looking to either start their paid search campaigns or to augment their existing ones. Ask Sponsored Listings is currently offering all new customers a 100% FREE account set up and assistance (note: Yahoo charges $200 for this service and Google doesn’t offer it at all) + a $50 credit towards your campaign! Pay Per Click Management Successful pay-per-click campaigns offer amazing returns and brand-building opportunities. But every ppc campaign needs careful management. Close attention should be paid to changing markets, bid wars get very heated and it pays to keep advert copy constantly adjusting. It takes time, and a whole lot of tracking to get it right. Pay per click however, has the best tracking capability of any form of marketing today. With most integrated reporting systems (paid & free), you can see information for all the major search engine PPC programs, track where your visitors are coming from, what they do once they get to your site, and which visits convert into actual sales. Then it’s up to you to turn around and do the most responsible thing you can with the data: make your pay per click campaign even more efficient. Executing PPC Campaigns Pay per click is a simple idea, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to execute. A successful campaign requires constant keyword management, keyword selection, ad placement and scheduling, bid management, and more. So either quickly learn ppc management yourself or leave the pay per click management to specialists. PPC specialists take the guesswork out of PPC so you can focus on what really matters: running your business. Whether you’re a local retailer or a national advertiser, specialits will create and implement a successful PPC campaign for your business. Are you running a “real” brick & mortar store? No worries. Manage your pay per click campaign well & it won’t be long before the customers are knocking at your door! There are 100’s of Pay Per Click Search Engines you can buy traffic from. My two personal favorites are Ask Sponsored Listings & Google Adwords. Article Source

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A Pay-Per-Click Advertising Crash Course

Customer & Influencer Research in Social Media

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

“If you don’t eat your meat you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!” Pink Floyd, The Wall. That quote from Another Brick in the Wall reminds me of the cart horse situation with social media marketing:  If you don’t know your customers you can’t engage them. How can you ever hope to engage your customers if you don’t understand who they are? There are so many questions from marketers and agencies alike about how best to grow businesses through online channels.  Questions are particularly popular when it comes to best practices for social tools. “Always do this” and “always do that” is what most marketers have been bombarded with for as long as there have been conferences to attend and email newsletters to subscribe to. Inevitably, many of the most pressing questions about social media come down to understanding who you’re trying to reach. For example, some common questions I hear a lot at conferences: Q: Should we blog or focus on Twitter? Is Facebook or LinkedIn a better fit? Foursquare or Gowalla? (Or other shiny object) A: Find where your customers spend their time and spend your time there too. Q: What type of social content should we create? How often? Where? A: Study your customers as they create, consume and share content.  Then you’ll know the what, how, when and where. They why has to come from your organization. Q: What  is the most overrated social media site? A: The one your customers aren’t using. So much time is spent on tactics without a good understanding of goals, audience and how to measure success with social media programs.  As we discuss Roadmapping social participation with companies, audience research is one of the key areas of importance. As I mention above, how can you reach and engage customers if you don’t understand them? Let’s say you’ve used a social media monitoring tool like SM2 to identify who is talking about your brand and topics of importance to your prospects and customers. Within this analysis, you’ve noticed that there’s alot of activity on Twitter. A logical next step might be to further investigate influential Twitter users.  If a paid tool like Radian6 or SM2 don’t fit your budget you can try free tools Trackur or Social Mention to gain some insight into content types, commentary and sharing/publishing platforms. Other tools you might use to identify influentials on Twitter include directories like wefollow. Under the tag, “ SEO ” you can see that Matt Cutts is the most influential.  Since reaching out directly to a popular person on Twitter, especially a Google employee, might not be prudent, it can be helpful to learn more about that individual and who they are influenced by as well as who they influence. Using the site Klout, you can see a Twitter influence score (78 is pretty high) and other information including predictions on who is most influenced by Matt and more interestingly, who may be an influencer of Matt Cutts. There are other tools that show communities surrounding an individual such as Top Twitter Friends. As for understanding what kind of content someone likes on Twitter, you can look at retweets and @ responses. You can also look at what kind of content and what user tweets get favorited most,. Favstar is a tool that does just that. In this example, Favstar shows which Tweets Matt Cutts has favorited . The types of content and users can be noted for guidance with future outreach. I mentioned free social media monitoring tools above including Social Mention. Below is a screengrab that shows how much information you can get from Social Mention with options to download into Excel friendly formats. Other Twitter user analysis tools worth looking at include Twitter Analyzer and Twitalyzer . The basic tools I’ve shared here are just that, basic. They’re good for poking around and getting familiar with discovery of social content and influencers.  However, it would take a more robust tool set (which is what Agencies and larger companies do) to scale monitoring over many topics, influencers and conversations. Other customer social media research tactics include: Survey your existing customers for social preferences and behaviors Review web analytics for social media sources and behaviors Tap into Compete, Quantcast, Alexa  information on specific social sites Leverage profile information provided by advertising staff on social sites themselves In combination with directly observed and experienced customer behaviors and preferences, general site data can compliment understanding of customer social content needs.  What are some tactics and tools you’ve found useful for researching customers on the social web?