You have a reputation.
That’s right – just about everyone on the internet does, and it’s based on all the things you post on your social media accounts. If you’re looking for a job, this should be one of your top concerns.
Business professionals are looking more closely at potential employees’ social accounts than ever before. You can prepare by polishing up your LinkedIn profile, but know that your online reputation extends into personal accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well.
Photo: Flickr
Social media is pretty awesome (have I mentioned this before?). It’s easy to get caught up in its awesome-ness, adding awesome friends and posting awesome pictures and signing up for more and more awesome networks. That is, it’s awesome until you get awesome-ly overwhelmed.
In the midst of burying yourself under all the awesome, you can find that you’ve buried yourself so deep that you can’t get out. Who are these people? Why are they all getting married and having babies? Whose cats are these?? What is Snapbookspace and when did I sign up for it?!?
However, if you know how to manage social media (maybe you are coincidentally a social media manager), you can make things awesome again. Here’s how:
Are you managing multiple accounts and their social profiles? Do you feel like you’re getting notifications and alerts all over the place, or that you can’t keep up with (un)following other users? What about when you’re managing different accounts across a range of industries – how do you keep up with what interests each audience?
We all know about and/or use tools like TweetDeck, Hootsuite, and HubSpot, but even with them, things can get still get crazy! If you do a Google search for helpful tools, the same ones pop up over and over again, so we put together a few underrated, time-tested services and apps we think you should give a try.
Everyone knows the infamous man in khakis: Jake from State Farm. He’s on the phone with your husband at 3 o’clock in the morning, wearing a red polo and sounding hideous. When we discovered Jake had his very own Twitter account, @JakeStateFarm, we had to follow along and see what this crazy insurance agent of the night had to say. After noticing that what he had to say was a lot, we knew a Twitter Q&A was in order. See what went down below!
Remember our all encompassing, sightly mind-blowing round-up of who to follow on Twitter in Boston? If not, we highly suggest clicking HERE to see who made the cut, and then clicking HERE to subscribe to that list on Twitter.
Don’t worry, we won’t say the word “click” again.
Well, since the birth of that list, we’ve reached out to our Twitter pros in hopes that they’d break off a piece of their social media wisdom. Below you’ll find the results: a magnificent cornucopia of tips, advice, and general online community wizardry, all available at your disposal.
So go ahead — read up and tweet out. Because when it comes to Twitter, it’s totally awesome to follow, but it’s totally awesomer to lead.
Oh, and that promise about no more clicking? We take it back. CLICK AWAY!
(NSFW language coming up. You’ve been warned!)
You’re a restaurant owner or chef, and a critic or customer totally throws your establishment under the bus. Or an artist, and somebody you’ve never met bashes your work. Or… you get the idea. How do you react?
It reaches you on a personal level, so you feel the urge to fire back. Right?
Just this week, a San Francisco chef did just that via a window sign, saying, “Yes we use MSG, we don’t believe in organic food, and we don’t give a sh*t about gluten-free.”
That’s what you want to do, but definitely not what you should do!
Unfortunately, this type of reaction is not uncommon, and it’s occurring far more often thanks to chefs and restaurant owners venting on very public social media platforms. The outrage gets picked up by news outlets, goes viral, and ends up in articles like this explaining how NOT to handle customer service.
It isn’t easy to run a successful social media account for your business (which is why you should hire Metter Media, ahem), but there are a few companies who not only do it well, they’re basically our Social Media Heroes who can teach us quite a bit. Your brand has more in common with national names than you think, and if you look closely at their updates, you’ll begin to see patterns that have helped them get to that special place in our Favorites.
Here are our picks for big brands doing social media right, and what, exactly, we can learn from their bacon tweets and khakis:
Let me tell you a little secret about social media marketing: big businesses are using you.
No, they’re not stealing your identity, and they’re not looking to trade your voice for a pair of rad human legs – but they are doing something pretty smart that you might not even notice.
That picture you posted on Instagram yesterday of Taco Bell’s newest Tex-Mex Frankenstein? Those hashtags: #TacoBae #ThinkOutsideTheBun? And your geo-tag showing you were at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell? That was an ad… that you provided… FO’ FREE. Continue reading
“You can dream, create, design, and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.” – Walt Disney
It also requires an engaging Twitter strategy.
The suits and imagineers behind Lake Buena Vista, Florida’s Walt Disney World (WDW) take many steps to stay current: attractions are built and updated, Starbucks are popping up everywhere, gluten-free and vegetarian food options have been added aplenty, craft beer selections have grown, and last year they even rolled out the MyMagic+ program, an app-and-wristband combination resulting in some serious online magic.
How do your customers find you online?
It seems like an obvious question. They go to your website, of course. But if they’ve never heard of your business, how else would they stumble across your site?
This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in, a way for you to better your website so Google and other engines can find and share your content with their users.
There are many ways to optimize your site, but previously, the best way to get your page to the top of search results was through link building. This meant getting links to your site placed around the web to increase your PageRank (the level of authority Google gives your site). Then, as with most things, people went overboard with this tactic, trying to game the system by paying for links in a high volume of places.
To combat this problem, Google started assigning weight to these links. Low-quality (say, on a spammy page with nothing but a bunch of paid links) and higher-quality links (the New York Times linked to you, for example) were given appropriate values and the linked website was ranked accordingly.
Keywords were – and still are –important in helping Google decide if your website matches a certain query. But again, this was abused and keyword stuffing became an issue. Thus, Google had to change its focus again.
So how does Google determine value today? Weighted links and keywords are still taken into consideration, but the search engine has shifted much of its focus to providing value to users and creating a more personalized experience.
This is where social media comes in.