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3 Social Media Tips That Apply To Every Social Network

November 17, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

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There are more social networks on the web than we realize. There are the big names such as Twitter and Facebook, but there are smaller communities as well. With so many different social networks on the web, it becomes difficult to find articles for those social networks and know how to grow a big audience.

Each social network has its unique set of features. Twitter only permits posts under 140 characters, Facebook has no limit, and on Pinterest and Instagram, you cannot send out a post unless it has a picture. No matter how different one social network is from the other, there are three social media tips that apply to growing a big audience on any social network.

#1: Interact

Some people ignore interacting with their audience while other people interact with numerous people on a daily basis. This is one of the few things where there actually seems to be no in between. You need to interact with all of the people who share your tweets to their followers and ask you questions.

In addition to interacting with your audience, it is important to interact with people who are the following:

Not in your audience
People who would be very likely to join your audience

If you interact with these people, you will grow your audience. Better yet, your audience will consist of like-minded people. Having an audience of like-minded people will result in your articles getting more attention from your audience.

#2: A number is just a number

It is better to have 1,000 targeted followers than it is to have 100,000 fake followers and no real ones. This is a true fact on any social network. Some people may believe that having the 100,000 fake followers boosts credibility because of the big number. However, these people do get caught, and being caught has the power to destroy all of those people’s authorities on those social networks.

No matter how low the prices drop for fake followers (some sites offer 1,000 fake followers for $8 nowadays), never give in and buy the followers. Even if it eventually costs just $4 for 1,000 fake followers, it is not worth it. Those are fake people who will never engage with your posts or buy anything from you.

In addition, buying fake followers will make your real followers feel uncomfortable. No one goes from 1,000 real followers to 50,000 real followers overnight unless they are a celebrity. If you make that overnight transition, chances are a bunch of your real followers will unfollow you.

Some fake follower sellers have threatened big blogs on the web that expose how the fake follower industry works. One fake follower seller threatened the Daily Dot by saying if the popular blog did not remove a certain article about fake followers, the seller would get tens of thousands of fake followers to follow the Daily Dot’s Twitter account.

In other words, this seller was threatening the Daily Dot with a free “service” normally worth $800. That sounds fishy, as buying fake followers should. Here is the Daily Dot’s article about what happened.

#3: Post consistently

You need to post at a consistent rate so people see you often. For a majority of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, that means sending out dozens of posts every day. I send out about 100 tweets every day, and that does not include when I am thanking someone for sharing one of my blog posts or anything like that.

The more often you post, the more your followers are going to see you. There are some disputes based on the ideal number of times to post. That varies from social network to social network, but based on what is up on the web, you should be posting at least one update on every social network every day with the exclusion of YouTube which should be once every 1-2 weeks.

In Conclusion

Social networks are different in many ways, but they all share some similarities. Each time you successfully grow a large social media audience, it becomes easier to grow an audience on your other social media accounts.

Are there any other social media tips you would like to share?

Why Interacting With Your Audience Is Worth The Time

November 14, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

I have responded to hundreds of comments on this blog and thousands of people’s tweets on Twitter. I have a policy to respond to every comment and every person who shares one of my articles. If you combine the amount of time I have spent interacting with my audience, it adds up to a few days. Even though I may only have to type a response under 140 characters on Twitter, I had done so thousands of times throughout the course of my journey.

After spending that much time interacting with everyone, I can say that it was definitely worth it. I continue responding to your comments and tweets to this day, and I still find joy in the interaction.

The main reason why all of this interaction is worth it is because I get to know my readers. Some of these interactions have resulted in new customers and subscribers.

One of my main businesses is my Kindle business in which I self-published as many valuable books as I can so I can get a high volume of sales. One of the problems I have seen is that customers believe they must have a Kindle device in order to download a Kindle book. Amazon allows people to install the Kindle app on smartphones and has the Cloud Reader for the people who prefer to read on their computers.

This knowledge and the interaction I get is important because I get some tweets that say things like this:

“@MarcGuberti I was just looking at your Twitter book on Amazon but do not have a Kindle. Is there another way for me to buy the book?”

I have actually gotten a few of these tweets. If I did not bother responding to these people, I would have lost customers. Luckily, I ended up responding to these customers telling them about Cloud Reader and the Kindle app for smartphones. A few minutes after telling someone on Twitter about Cloud Reader and the Kindle app, I would see another sale for my book.

Some of the people who I have been interacting with for a long time have also left reviews for my books. Getting reviews for a book is very important to becoming successful on Amazon, and I know a few people who I have met on social media that would definitely leave a review for any other book I publish.

In addition, there are many people who visit this blog, leave a comment, and then come back. I see those comments, and I respond to every single one of them. Getting returning visitors is helpful because the more times a visitor returns to your blog, the more likely that visitor is going to stick around for a long time.

If you are not interacting with your audience right now, you need to set aside some time each day to interact with your audience. Your audience makes or breaks your success which is why you need to engage with that audience. Engaging with the people in your audience will result in those people remembering who you are.

How do you interact with your audience?

How The Huffington Post Thrived On Twitter And How Much Traffic They Get From It

November 12, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I recently went from tweeting every 20 minutes to every 15 minutes. I thought tweeting once every five minutes would be absurd and annoy followers. However, the Huffington Post tweets every five minutes, and since the account boasts millions of followers and gains over 3,000 followers every day, tweeting every five minutes does not look like the problem.

I was fascinated that the Huffington Post has its big audience, tweets every five minutes, and gets dozens of favorites and retweets for each tweet. I looked at the account and concluded that Twitter must be a big part of the Huffington Post’s success.

I decided to do some digging.

Just like many big websites, the Huffington Post hides its traffic numbers. However, after I did my Twitter experiment with tweeting once every 15 minutes, I concluded I knew how to calculate the amount of traffic the Huffington Post gets from Twitter. I decided to use my own statistics as a guide and use that rate to calculate the Huffington Post’s traffic.

Tweeting once every 15 minutes with 126,000 Twitter followers at the time resulted in around 450 daily visitors. The Huffington Post tweets once every five minutes which is three times my rate. That means if the Huffington Post had 126,000 Twitter real, targeted followers, it would be getting 1,350 visitors from Twitter alone.

That is a big difference, but the bigger difference is the amount of followers the Huffington Post has. In September, when I first set off to tweeting once every 15 minutes, the Huffington Post had about 4,540,000 followers (let’s assume for the sake of the calculation that all of those followers are real). That’s 36 times more followers than me. That theoretically means the Huffington Post is getting visitors referred from Twitter 36 times more than I me if I tweeted once every five minutes.

Based on the statistics provided in this blog post, the Huffington Post gets close to 48,600 daily from Twitter alone. The Huffington Post probably gets an extra 5,000 to 10,000 daily visitors from Twitter because they tweet the news.

Here are the major ways that the Huffington Post gets tens of thousands of daily visitors from Twitter alone:

They have a big audience.
They tweet very frequently (once every five minutes).
They tweet new content throughout the day (over 100 new articles are added to the Huffington Post every day because it has numerous contributors).
They tweet about the news (many stories that make the news end up becoming trending topics. Creating and tweeting new content about news stories allows the Huffington Post to get more exposure during trending topics).
They tweet about celebrities (there are millions of people who care about everything the Kardashians do. Let’s not forget about all of the other big ones out there).
They use headlines that make us want to learn more. Take a look at this tweet. The headline automatically grabs your attention, and the tweet’s engagement prove that it got a lot of attention.

In Conclusion

That’s how the Huffington Post thrives on Twitter. They tweet very frequently, constantly post new content that people like to read, and continue to grow their audience. More people learn about the Huffington Post as friends retweet the Huffington Post’s tweets and share the online magazine with their friends. That is how they get tens of thousands of visitors from Twitter every day.What are your thoughts on the Huffington Post? What are your thoughts on their Twitter strategy? Please share your thoughts below.

The Five Things You Must Do On Twitter Immediately

November 10, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Twitter is constantly growing, and it is getting noisier than ever. In addition, many people have been on Twitter for over a year. There are even people who have been on Twitter for almost an entire decade. That is impressive, but as Twitter continues to get older, and you continue to live your life, some of the things going on in your life will probably be completely different from what they were a year ago.

Few people follow the routine of checking their Twitter accounts to make sure everything is up to date. There are some people who entered their information but never bothered to check on it. Outdated information is a problem that plagues many Twitter users. To make sure your information is up to date, here are the five things that you need to do right now:

#1: Check your bio.

There may be information on your bio that no longer applies or has been changed significantly. Many people write their bios, but those bios do not get updated for weeks, months, and in some cases, years. Chances are many things have happened from the time you created your bio to now.

I like to promote my Twitter account on my other social networks, and in one of my social media accounts, I mentioned that I have 10,000 Twitter followers. I had to squeeze in that extra 0 to make the information accurate. In addition, I completely forgot to mention I was an author because when I created some of these social media accounts, I was not an author at the time. I had to change my bio to let people know that I an author so my bio would be more up to date and more people would buy my books.

#2: Ask yourself if you need a new avatar.

Some people look completely different from they did a year ago. Although that mostly applies to kids growing up, it is possible you now go by a new haircut style.

What is more likely of the two scenarios is that a better picture of you or your company’s logo was taken this year than the one you have in your avatar. If you change your avatar on Twitter, be sure to change the avatar for all of your social networks, blogs, and guest blog pages.

If your avatar is of a cartoon character, nature, or anything similar, put a picture of yourself as the avatar instead. We know who the cartoon characters are. We want to know who you are.

#3: Check the link in your bio.

There are many people who create multiple blogs before they ended up creating the main blog that they continuously update for many years to come. The people who took this approach may have a link in their bio that does not reflect their main blog.

That was the case for me, and as a result, I had to repeatedly change the link in my Twitter bio. I went from a Red Sox blog to a Yugioh blog to a Lego blog to this one. Now that I finally have this blog, I have been able to keep the link in my bio.

Another thing you want to do with your link is to make sure it still works. There are many reasons why a link would not work such as…

You may have accidentally misspelled it
There may be a problem on Twitter’s end
You may have recently changed the URL

These three reasons may sound silly, but it is always good to double-check your link just to make sure it works. It is better to be safe than sorry.

#4: Check your header picture.

Your header picture needs to emphasize your expertise, an event, or a product. It is important to avoid using a default header that Twitter provides or to get a picture from the internet just for the sake of having a header.

There needs to be a reason behind the picture, and that reason should match up with expertise, an event, a product, or a combination of the three. You may have a better header picture to choose from than the one you are currently using.

#5: Make all of your social media bios as close to identical as possible.

I use the same avatar and nearly identical bios for all of my social media profiles. The reason I do this is because you’ll know it is me when you see my profile on Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other social network as well. I always mention my main credentials as well as my hobbies.

You should check your bios and avatars on your other social networks to make sure they match up with your Twitter bio and avatar. See what you can do to make all of your social media profiles match so people know it’s you when they see you on a different social network.

In Conclusion

Those are the five things you need to do on Twitter before doing anything else. It is amazing how quickly certain information becomes outdated on the web, but by double checking your information, you will prevent your information from staying outdated for long.

What were your thoughts on double checking your information on Twitter? Do you have a 6th thing that you believe people need to do on Twitter as soon as possible? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

Why I Started Blogging

November 7, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

After writing over 1,000 blog posts, I finally set aside some time to recall how this journey began. There are millions of people embarked on their own journeys, but few people take the time to go back to the roots. Few people ask questions like, “Why did I start?” or “Why did I create my own team?”

Starting blogging was one of the best experiences I have ever had. Blogging has allowed me to write about what I want to write about and reach out to countless people. The big perk of blogging that initially attracted me was the ability to do what you love at home while making a profit. I never had plans at any point in my life of what job or career I would pursue. The only thing I knew is that it was going to be a lot of fun, and blogging has definitely fulfilled that goal.

It is very important to do something that you enjoy because this will make you put in as much of your time and effort as possible. Working at a job you do not enjoy will result in you avoiding the extra mile and not seeking to improve in your work.

That is why I pursued blogging. I enjoyed it, and it brought in some extra money. Over the years, I have been able to create a blogging empire that results in more revenue and more enjoyment than a summer job. I can’t even imagine being an employee for someone else.

Surprisingly, I never thought of my blog posts as more essays to write or anything like that. Blogging gives me flexibility. I was able to talk about the Red Sox, Yugioh Cards, and Legos, and people came. All of those blogs ended up getting a few thousand visitors. This particular blog has been the gem of them all, but I got to this stage years after I started blogging.

Blogging is one of the best journeys anyone can take. Blogging gives you the power to put your content in front of the world and build an influence. I am a proud blogger, and I do not see myself stopping anytime soon. In fact, I will most likely never stop.

What was the hook that got you into blogging?

5 Reasons To Use Bitly

November 5, 2014 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

There are countless tools on the web, but Bitly is one of the best tools on the web for marketers. Chances are you may have heard of Bitly before or have seen the Bitly links in action. Someone you know may even use Bitly. It is a tool that many marketers cannot go without, and if you do not have a Bitly account, here are five reasons why you need to have one.

Bitly shortens your links. The main reason why most people run out of characters on Twitter is because they tweet the entire link. Bitly is the solution to this problem.
Bitly takes a link of any length and turn it into a 20-23 characters link that gives you more characters to play around with on Twitter.
Bitly saves those links. Unlike similar services such as TinyUrl, Bitly saves the links so you can constantly reuse them. If you recycle your social media posts, this is a great feature that will allow you to quickly relocate older articles.
Bitly gives you superior statistics on those links. This third reason is what truly separates Bitly from the other link shortening services. Bitly gives you incredible statistics on your links. You get to see how many clicks you got hour by hour for a whole day as well as how many clicks you got within the hour. You can check how many clicks your Bitly links got for as far as 30 days.
You can categorize your links so they are easier to find. Bitly allows you to put multiple links into one bundle. Creating numerous bundles will allow to categorize your links so you can find them with ease. You can categorize blog posts that you recycle in one bundle and the articles that you want to read in another bundle. There are countless ways to categorize your content on Bitly.
You get to see how popular a link is. Some links are very popular which indicates you should be tweeting them out. Chances are if you tweet a popular link, more followers than usual will click on the link and retweet it to everyone.

Those are the five reasons why you should be using Bitly. What are your thoughts on the list? For the Bitly users out there, do you have any additional reasons why you use Bitly? Please share your thoughts below.