Social Media

5 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Social Media

August 10, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

In the thick waters of competition, many people want to do everything in their power to ignore the competition. Every competitor is rushing so quickly to rise above the other competitors that they forget to look around. Believe it or not, there are many things you can learn from your competition, and there are five things you can learn about them from social media.

How to get more followers. Your top competitors are getting more followers every day than the average people. Chances are these competitors know a trade secret that few people know about. You can dig for articles about them on the internet to find out their secret method, and it works. As you become better at picking up on social media strategies, you will not need to search through as many articles. I know exactly how people get 1 million likes on Facebook, but it involves a lot of advertising.
How to get more engagement. We have all learned at some point in our lives that some social media posts are better than others. Some of your competitors are getting more engagement than others. The competitors who are getting the most engagement are the ones you need to look at carefully. How are they putting it off? Is a giveaway the answer, a powerful article, motivational quote, or something else?
What kind of content to post. All you need to do for this part is browse through your competitors’ timelines. When you browse through these timelines, pay special attention to the posts that get the most engagement. Do they have anything in common? If so, then that’s something you need to replicate.
Which social networks to use. Some of your top competitors will have their strongest presences on the same social network. Pinterest is a great place for jewelry stores and tech gadget sellers. You can grow a presence on any social network for anything, but some social networks allow you to speed up the growth process based on users’ interests.
How the audience engages. By looking at your top competitors, you will see how a targeted audience engages with them. By knowing how an audience engages, you will be able to provide the type of content that encourages those people to engage with you.

Competitors are constantly striving to push each other down and move up in their stampedes. However, if one person takes some time to analyze the leaders of the stampede, that person will be able to develop the same mindset and implement the same tactics as the leaders. Soon enough, that person will move closer to the front of the stampede, not the ones who constantly try to push each other around.

3 Ways To Take Advantage Of Pinterest’s New Messaging Feature

August 7, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Pinterest rolled out a new feature that allows users to send messages in the same way Twitter users can send out direct messages and Facebook users can send private messages. Vine also has this feature for their videos, and other social networks have the feature as well. Not only did Pinterest finally join the bandwagon, but their new messaging feature is something that you absolutely must take advantage of. Here are three ways to take advantage of Pinterest’s new messaging feature.

Develop stronger connections with your followers. Many of the people I know well on Twitter had lengthy conversations consisting of numerous direct messages. Pinterest new messaging feature will allow similar connections to take place. However, there is a significant difference. With Twitter DMs, you have a 140 character limit, but with a Pinterest message, you are able to send out a message that is up to 500 characters long. That’s more than three times the length of a Twitter DM.
Promote your pins. The Pinterest messaging feature allows you to send pins to your followers. This is a great way to promote your pins and possibly get more repins in the process. The great thing about pins in a Pinterest message is that people can like, repin, and send a pin right from the message. That means people do not have to click an additional link to access the pin, and it is easier for people to share the pins you send them.
Gather testimonials. On Twitter, when people say that they bought one of my books, I continue to have a conversation with the person and will sometimes ask someone if they would like to leave a review for the book on Amazon. This has been very successful for me because I get to interact with customers who enjoy my products already, and asking them to leave a quick review. Pinterest now allows people to do the same thing as previously done on Twitter, but now you have 360 extra characters to play with.

Another notable thing you should know about Pinterest’s new messaging feature is that it is very easy to organize the people you talk with. When you ignite a conversation with someone, an icon with that person’s profile picture appears on the bottom left of the screen. Multiple icons can appear on the bottom left corner of your screen which makes it easy for you to talk to multiple people at the same time. This feature allows you to prioritize who you talk to on Pinterest and remember who you need to talk to on Pinterest. You can easily remove any person from the left corner of your screen with the click of a button.

Pinterest’s new messaging feature is definitely a huge improvement. It finally allows users to interact with each other on a more 1-to-1 based level. What are your thoughts on Pinterest’s new messaging feature? How do you see yourself using it in the future? Please share your thoughts below, and also be sure to send me a message on Pinterest @MarcGuberti.

4 Common Misconceptions About Social Media

August 6, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Social media has been proven to be a powerhouse for many people’s business strategies. Social media is the primary way to grow your blog’s traffic, connect with customers, and interact with others. However, not everyone is getting the desired amount of traffic from their social networks. While some people get hundreds of daily visitors from their social networks, others struggle to get five daily visitors from their social networks. What’s the difference? Chances are the people who are not getting as many traffic and customer connections on social media are going by these four misconceptions.

Do everything you can to be like a celebrity. When people think of a celebrity, they think of someone with over 1 million followers who is only following 100 people. However, there are only two reasons these celebrities have reached that point. Either the entire world knew about the celebrity before Twitter or these people bought fake followers. In fact, most celebrities with millions of real followers also bought millions of fake followers to make themselves look bigger than they really are. Chances are you won’t get this status. It is a status rewarded to a select few with a lot of popularity. I wanted to get the celebrity status but quickly found myself stuck at 1,667 followers. After deciding to follow other people, my follower number, blog traffic, and sales soared. It’s okay to follow other people even if that means following thousands of other people. Some of the people you follow may become your next customers.
Send out a random number of posts at random times every day. By sending out a random number of posts at random times every day, the responses you get from those posts will also be random. You may send out a post at 7 pm, but your followers may be logged in at 6 pm. That means you lost people by sending the post at the wrong time. I always schedule tweets with HootSuite so I am able to tweet once every 20 minutes. Some social media platforms work differently, but on Twitter, I am able to send out one tweet every 20 minutes without annoying people. If you are not ready to send out one post every 20 minutes, what you need to do is schedule your posts when most of your followers are on the social network. Facebook Insights allows you to see when most of your fans are on Facebook, and Tweriod allows you to see when most of your followers are on Twitter.
Not posting about yourself enough. There are numerous articles on the web that suggest only tweeting about your blog 20% of the time. However, that is not nearly enough times to get more visibility. If your blog posts are valuable, then your followers will not care about whether you only tweet about or only share links on Facebook that go to your blog posts. If your blog posts are valuable, and your followers are the targeted people who would enjoy reading those blog posts, you can share them more often. I share my blog posts on Twitter about 90% of the time.
Automating all of your posts. Some of the people who schedule their social media posts do that just so they don’t have to log into the social network. However, automating all of your posts prevents you from interacting with your followers. Asking a question at the moment is an easy way to get more feedback. One of the answers may teach you something new. In addition to asking questions, you can thank people for sharing your blog posts or buying your products. There are plenty of ways to interact with your social media followers, but regardless of how you interact, interaction is essential towards your success on social media.

Were you deceived by the misconceptions? Please share your thoughts below.

10 Valuable Articles From The Archives

August 4, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

The problem with any blog is that as more content gets added to them, other content gets completely forgotten about. A tweet can only do so much to bring back attention to older blog posts that got published months ago. There are many blog posts on this blog that were written last year with methods that still work to this day. In fact, some of those blog posts are still popular, but they still don’t appear on the front page. I decided to dig through my blog to find 10 valuable articles that you should give a second look. They contain oodles of knowledge and things to think about. Some are longer than others.

100 Amazing Blogging Tips

100 Amazing Pinterest Tips

70 Amazing Twitter Tips

20 Thoughts To Live By

The Problem With Waiting For Something To Happen

What Do You Want To Be Remembered For?

Every Blogger Needs To See This Picture

New Year’s Resolutions: Memory Or Lifestyle?

Esurance Won The Ad Bowl By A Landslide. That’s what everyone was raving about when Esurance did its giveaway. The follow-up blog post is “Reanalyzing The Day After The Super Bowl: Was The $1.5 Million Giveaway Worth It?”

What The New York Times, Apple, Twitter, And JetBlue Have In Common

As a bonus article, I present Why Fast Food Restaurants Are Successful.

Which one was your favorite?

Three Reasons Why You Need To Use Instagram

August 4, 2014 by Marc Guberti 14 Comments

For a very long time, I underestimated the power of Instagram. I saw Instagram as a personal social network where people would just post pictures to friends. Everything changed when I responded to some people on Twitter, and after receiving a response, said how happy they were that I was not a bot.

I guess a 16 year old entrepreneur with over 100,000 Twitter followers is a rare sight that seems too good to be true, but it amazed me to think that if I did not respond to these people, they would have thought I was a bot. It’s amazing what you don’t know and what you learn by interacting.

Therefore, I have taken a stronger interest in Instagram. I still see it as a personal social network, but now I see Instagram in a new light. Not only that, but I would go as far as saying that everyone should have an Instagram account. That’s a big jump from someone who never thought of using Instagram. Now you are probably curious why I changed my mind so dramatically about the social network. Here’s why:

Instagram allows people to know you at a more personal level. In other words, what do you do when you are not wearing the tie, buttoned down shirt, and writing blog posts. Most people only know me for writing blog posts and books. I want people to get more into who I am as a person. I run outside, play video games, and do other fun activities. Now I am using Instagram to share some of that.
Instagram allows you to look back at where you were and what you did. On Instagram, you have the power to look back at great memories. You can go back to accomplishments, special days, and places you went to every day just by scrolling through your Instagram pictures.
Instagram pictures get a lot of engagement. I have seen some people with 500 Instagram followers who get over 50 likes for their photos. It is easy for a photo to spread far and wide on Instagram. All you need to do is take good pictures and have a story behind each picture.

Instagram allows you to capture a part of you that most people don’t get to see: your personal life. You don’t have to take a picture of yourself 24/7 or show people the bad parts of your life. Just take enough pictures so you can look back at them, show people who you are when you are not working, and get more engagement all at the same time.

Do you use Instagram? I am a newbie just taking picture after picture. What are your thoughts about that social network?