social media

10 Social Media Tips For Entrepreneurs

November 28, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Social media is one of the most powerful avenues for traffic and connections. The only problem with social media is that it is also a giant maze. Not everyone knows where they need to go, how to get the connections, how to grow an audience, and what they want to be known for.

Each time another person becomes successful or well-known because of social media, entrepreneurs are seeing the importance of social media more and more. The truth is that every entrepreneur only needs two things to become successful on social media:

Guidance
Dedication (the will to implement and make it happen)

Although all of the dedication comes from you, I will provide you with the guidance you need to have a smoother journey on social media. Here are the 10 social media tips that you can utilize to be more successful.

#1: Identify Who Your Target Audience Is And Focus On Them

One of the most important things you need to do before anything else is identify who your target audience is. There are many people who make identifying a target audience much harder than it needs to be. I am going to break it down into two questions:

What do you post about often (what is your niche and expertise)?
Who would find those posts valuable?

Answering these two questions will allow you to find your target audience. The main benefit of identifying your target audience is that you now know which types of people are going to retweet, favorite, and engage with most of your tweets. Having an engaged audience is critical towards success on any social network.

Just because you have 100,000 followers does not mean you are going to be successful. The person with 50,000 targeted followers is doing better than the person with 100,000 non-targeted followers that rarely engage.

#2: Engage With Your Audience

Engagement is a two way street. You want to build an audience that engages with your content, but you also want to engage with your audience. Engaging with your audience allows you to see more than just a number.

Regardless of how many followers you have, it is important to individually know the followers who interact with you. I know a few people who comment on numerous blog posts (if you are one of them, you know who you are). I respond to all of these comments on my blog and respond to all of the people who share my content on my social networks.

Does this take up time? It definitely takes up about 30 minutes every day, but this interaction allows me to know my audience. Knowing your audience allows you to realize what type of content they like. In addition, some of the people I interact with have subscribed to this blog and bought some of my products.

Interaction allows you to get a friendship going, and friendship in itself is a two way street. That’s why, “I owe you” is a common phrase. If one of your friends does something good for you, chances are you will do something good for that friend in return. Being friendly to your audience and engaging with them may entice them to do something in return such as subscribe to your blog or tell their friends about you.

#3: Post As Consistently And Frequently As Possible

Many people think that posting often is a bad thing because it will annoy followers. I decided to give it a try and found the complete opposite. Posting more consistently and frequently has allowed me to engage with my followers more than ever before, and it has also resulted in my blog getting a big spike in traffic that never seemed to go away.

For the tweeting in particular, I send out one new tweet every 15 minutes. Some people may think I would be annoying my followers at this frequency, but that is not the case. The truth about social networks is that many people are simply using social networks to check their activity for a short period of time.

The average Twitter is never on the social network for more than 20 minutes at a time. That means most of the people who go on Twitter only see one of my tweets unless they log in again or scroll through my timeline. It is okay to post often, and it is also recommended.

#4: Use A Universal Avatar On All Of Your Social Networks

If you think of a business, you think of their logo. When you think of Apple, you see the white apple that someone took a bite out of. When you think of Twitter, you see the blue bird. Similarly to how people think of the logo associated with the business, the people in your niche who think of you will think of your avatar.

Using a universal avatar for all of your social networks will make it easier for people to remember who you are. The easier it is for someone to remember you, the more often that person will visit your blog and see what you are posting on your social networks.

#5: Do not be afraid to promote yourself often

There are many social media users who go by the fear that promoting yourself too often will make their followers become unfollowers. This is a concept that many experts use to tell marketers to avoid over-promoting their products on social media. If you are using social media for that reason, it’s not going to work out well.

However, it is okay to promote yourself. In fact, it is okay to promote yourself often, but only if you promote yourself the right way. The right way to promote yourself is by promoting your blog posts on your social networks. It is entirely okay to tell people about the same blog post twice as long as the two social media posts are spaced out for a long period of time.

On Twitter, I go by a 4-7 day cycle depending on how my spreadsheets are organized, and I send out over 100 tweets every day. Someone would have to scroll down for a very long time to find any social media posts that repeat themselves.

As long as your blog posts are valuable to your followers, they will not mind that you promote them often. On the contrary, some of your followers will be eager to read the other blog posts that you share on your social networks.

#6: Focus On One Social Network

There are many social networks to choose from, and that’s the problem. Many people create accounts on numerous social networks and have small audiences on all of them. It is better to have a large audience on one social network than it is to have a bunch of small audiences on a bunch of social networks.

When I started my social media journey, I decided to focus most of my time and energy on Twitter. It paid off nicely, and Twitter now brings in a bulk of this blog’s traffic.

However, it is important to have multiple social networks with big presences. The best way to approach this is by taking another social network seriously after you master one social network. After I mastered Twitter, I went over to Pinterest. Now that I have over 15,000 Pinterest followers, I am now finding time to focus on YouTube.

The main takeaway: you need to eventually be on multiple social networks, but in order to have large audiences on all of them, take it one step at a time.

#7: Identify Where You Want To Be Month By Month

Many people do better on social media by giving themselves goals. The reason why goals are very effective is because they create a sense of direction. You need to have some kind of an idea of where you are heading.

What are some of the things you aspire to do on social media? Maybe you aspire to get 100,000 engaged followers, or you aspire to get more blog traffic.

The aspiration is a starting point towards social media success. After you give yourself the aspiration, you need to identify the steps you are going to take to get there. It is important to take give yourself steps that are neither too easy nor too difficult to achieve.

Gaining 100 followers every week is a great start. It’s not far out there, but it’s not incredibly easy either. If you are at that point already, raise the bar to 150 followers every week and keep on raising the bar as you accomplish the goal. Then, once you identify the aspiration and give yourself the steps you will need to get there, all you have to do at that point is implement.

#8: Be on social media every day

Just like everything else, social media requires practice. The more you show up and do the right things, the more likely you are to have the big audience. “Do the right things” is in bold because most people are already on social media every day. However, not all of that time is being used effectively.

Some people who use social media are using it to procrastinate. There are many videos and social media accounts to choose from. In essence, social media can either be your best friend or your worst enemy.

When I say be on social media every day, I mean you are utilizing it as an entrepreneur who interacts with the audience, not someone who procrastinates. Definitely use social media, but use it wisely.

#9: Do not let social media consume too much of your time

Social media is a great tool to grow your business and get more traffic. However, you need to have a good business and valuable content so all of the work you put in on social media was worth it. Just because you have 100,000 followers does not mean you are going to make a full-time income.

Having that many followers does significantly help out in the process, but you need more than a big audience. You still need to find a good chunk of time in your day to create products and work on big projects for your business. That way, when you grow your social media audience, you can lead them to places that can bring in more revenue.

You should constantly be trying to perform the same activities on social media is a shorter amount of time. If you can do something in 15 minutes instead of 30 minutes, then make that change. I use HootSuite Pro and am able to schedule hundreds of tweets per day in just five minutes instead of a few hours every day if I had to manually schedule tweets.

#10: Be patient

This last tip is a tip that commonly appears in numerous articles, and it appears in this one as well. Being patient is the most important tip on the entire list. Sure I went into more detail in the other tips about growing an audience and boosting numbers, but none of those changes happen overnight.

It took me 993 days to reach 100,000 Twitter followers, and most of that big change happened in the last year of that span. For more than half of that time, I was lost and had no idea what to do. I was struggling to grow my audience and was stuck at 1,667 followers for many months. Then, methods started to work, I modified them along the way, and now I have a large, engaged Twitter audience.

There is no such thing as an overnight success. All of the leaders in your niche got to where they are after years of work. By not giving in and learning new techniques along the way, you may become a big player on social media.

In Conclusion

Social media is a powerful way to get more traffic and build an engaged audience. There are many entrepreneurs in various niches who have utilized social media and seen their traffic, subscribers, and sales jump up. Patience is the key to success on any social network, and the more time you put into the learning process, the better you will become.

Do you have any social media tips for entrepreneurs? Which of these tips was your favorite?

3 Social Media Tips That Apply To Every Social Network

November 17, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

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 To Come Up With A Successful Social Media Strategy

November 22, 2013 by Marc Guberti 1 Comment

Being a power user on social media isn’t easy. It won’t be a walk in the park, but becoming a power user on social media is possible. The only way to become a power user on social media is by creating and implementing your own social media strategy. There are many components that go into the right social media strategy. Some are necessary components, others are optional, and since this is your social media strategy, you have the option to add more components to your strategy at any time.

The first component to a successful social media strategy is to decide which social network(s) you are going to use. You don’t want to be all over the place on social media because you won’t be able to focus a lot of time and effort on a social network. The best social media strategies focus on one social network that gets 80% of your time. The second social network that you want to focus on gets at least 10% of your time, but it never goes over 20%. If you have any other social networks that you want to put into the strategy, they get squeezed together.

After you identify your primary social network, it’s time to find tools for that social network. Twitter is my primary social network, and there are countless tools. I do have my favorites, but you may have others as well. Choose 5-8 tools for your social network that will help you through your journey.

After you get the tools assembled, it’s time to put them to work. Test them out, see which ones you want to continue using, and see which ones don’t work for you. The goal is to become familiar with these tools before you use your strategy to get numerous followers. You want to make sure everything is okay with all of the tools that you plan to use.

When the tools are assembled and you know which ones you want to use, it’s time to get the following. Follow people who are:

Very likely to follow back.
People who share common interests.

You need both A and B when you decide which people you are going to follow. There are some exceptions to A:

If the person that doesn’t follow back is someone you admire.
If the person that doesn’t follow back is well-known and has conversations with their followers. Talking with this person will boost your visibility.

A social media strategy is a “rinse and repeat” at it’s finest. You can’t perform the methods of your social media strategy once to get the best results. You will have to use some of the tools daily. I schedule tweets on HootSuite every day, and I check my statistics on TwitterCounter every day as well. However, after a lot of rinsing and repeating, your social media strategy will turn you into a power user.

5 Social Media Myths Debunked

November 17, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The typical newbie does everything he/she can in order to learn more about social media. However, there are some myths that newbies will think are true. These myths can stagnate progress or make someone go in the wrong direction. These are the 5 big social media myths that trick a lot of people.

There are no golden ratios. A classic one is to post about other people’s content 80% of the time and your content only 20% of the time. Some people only post about their content while others post about their content more than half of the time. If your content is helpful, your followers won’t mind.
Getting over 100,000 followers is possible. The best way to increase your following quickly is by following other people on your social networks, getting follow backs, and posting consistently. Once you find a way to master the system, you could get 100,000 followers before the following year comes to an end. All you need to do is discover a way to consistently gain 274 followers every day. Once you master a way to do that, you will get hundreds of thousands of followers every year.
Your results are going to get a lot better as you go. Whether you are gaining 5 followers every day or 50 followers every day, more people are starting to know about you. As you find more methods to increase your following while continuing to use the methods you are already implementing, you will be able to get hundreds of followers every day.
You should schedule tweets for as many times of the day as you can with HootSuite. Tweeting every 15 minutes is okay as long as you tweet like that on a consistent basis. You won’t annoy your followers by tweeting too many times if you are consistent. Then, your followers will know when to expect your tweets, and as they see you more on their timeline, their trust for you will grow.
Friends will be very helpful towards your success on social media. Some people view the definition of “being in business” as when a stranger buys your product. If your friends share your posts on social media, they are reaching out to a larger group of people. Each time one of my friends shares one of my blog posts, my blog gets more traffic. Your friends are going to be very helpful; don’t be afraid to ask them.

5 Places To Get Good Statistics

November 11, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I am a big fan of statistics. I use statistics for all of my social networks, all of my YouTube videos, and for this blog as well. These are 10 places that I use to look at my statistics:

WordPress provides so many statistics that it’s mind-boggling. You get to find out how your visitors were referred to your blog, which of your blog posts are the most popular, who’s subscribed to your blog, which countries visitors are from, what people click on once they get to your blog, and search engine terms people use to get to your blog.

You get to see all of the websites and search engines that refer traffic to your blog. My favorite part about this feature is that you also get to see which social networks are referring traffic. I know when Twitter is referring traffic and how many people came from Twitter in a particular day. When you get traffic from Pinterest, you also get to see which pins are referring people to your blog. You also get to see how many times an individual pin gets clicked on.

You also get to see your top posts and pages. If one of your posts is doing very well compared to the others, that is the content your visitors want to see more often. If you write a blog post similar to your popular blog post, that blog post will increase your traffic.

You also get to see which links on your blog are getting clicked. You’ll be able to identify which of your products are the most popular, and this will allow you to learn about where your sales are coming from. You will also be able to learn which of your social network icons is getting clicked on the most.

For blog subscribers, you get to see how long it has been since they subscribed to your blog. You get to see the number of hours, weeks, months, and years since they subscribed to your blog.

Most search engine terms are going to remain as unknown, but some search engine terms will show up. Those are the search engine terms that you should build your blog around, and they should appear as tags on your blog.

2. TwitterCounter is great for Twitter. You get to see how many people followed you on a particular day, the number of people you followed on a particular day, and the number of times you tweeted on a particular day. Free users get access to up to 6 months of their history while Premium users get more features such as statistics for mentions, retweets, and more than 6 months of statistics. TwitterCounter provides all of its users with estimations of when they will reach certain milestones. If you want to know when you will reach 1,000 followers, TwitterCounter will give you an estimate. TwitterCounter’s estimations are based on the average change in followers every week. Higher milestone estimates become available as you get more followers. When you get in the thousands, your milestones are going to be in factors of 500 (8,000 followers, then 8,500 followers, etc). When you reach 10,000 followers, your milestones are going to be in factors of 1,000 (11,000 followers, then 12,000 followers, etc). If you want to reach a certain number of followers before the New Year, looking at the milestones will help you determine if what you are doing right now will allow you to accomplish that goal.

3. PinAuthority is similar to TwitterCounter, but it works for Pinterest. Unlike most places where you can check Pinterest statistics, PinAuthority is free and provides statistics for up to 3 months. However, there are some problems with PinAuthority. The first problem is that once your statistics get updated, they can’t be updated until the next day. The second problem is that you have to manually check in on PinAuthority every day in order to get the statistics that TwitterCounter automatically provides for you. There are paid options that are better than PinAuthority such as Pin Reach, but PinAuthority will provide more statistics than any other free Pinterest statistics site. Pinterest is a new social network, and there aren’t any free Pinterest statistics websites like TwitterCounter just yet.

4. You can’t call yourself a statistics guy or gal if you don’t know about Bitly. Bitly provides statistics for the number of clicks based on intervals of 30 days, 14 days, 7 days, 24 hours, and the past hour. Bitly allows you to see which of your links are popular and where people are clicking those links. Just like WordPress, you get to see all of the referrers, but in addition to seeing the referrers, Bitly organizes the data into a pie chart. Right now, the referral traffic I get from Twitter looks like a Pac-Man compared to my other sources of traffic for my Bitly links. There is also a pie chart that allows you to see which countries these people are coming from. You can even track the statistics for individual links. Bitly provides a lot of amazing statistics, and it’s also a URL shortener for all of those long links.

5. Pin Alerts only offers one statistic, but the statistic they offer is crucial towards success. Pin Alerts sends an email informing you when something on your website gets pinned. You get informed about when your website was pinned, a link to the board that the pin resides, a link to the pin, and the person who pinned your pin. Pin Alerts allows you to receive this information, and if you keep all of Pin Alerts’ emails together, you can create a list of your fans who are on Pinterest. You can follow all of the people who pinned a picture from your website, and you can share the pin since you have the link. If your website has pictures and a Pin It button, then you really need to use Pin Alerts.