When social first went social most of us endeavored to connect with friends, but the inevitable business marketing and internet marketing boom came into play and most people soon realized that they could do more with their social personalities to gain exposure for their business.  At the same time the question of how to keep business and pleasure separate delivered more stress than traffic for many businesses.  As followers, fans and friends increased so did the difficulty of keeping personal posts from trickling down the business pipeline. 

The truth is you can never predict what a friend may post on your social networking profile.  Forget friends even, what about cousins sharing family drama or jealous exes sharing dirty little secrets?  Is this really the kind of information you want an employer or client to read about? Probably not.  And this is where most people get the idea to create multiple personalities in social networks to serve both the business and pleasure side of being social, but maintaining those personalities takes a toll on their real self. 

Where the social multiple personality disorder really takes its toll is in maintaining multiple identities and keeping things sincere and transparent.  How much to hide here and how much to tell there can put your head in a bit of a spin.  There is nothing wrong with being personal on your business profile.  Quite the opposite is true.  In many cases, being transparent and showing personality are the best ways to actually build stronger business ties.  However posting pictures of a drunken mishap would obviously not be a good brand builder (unless your brand is associated with drunken behavior of course). 

There are different networks for maintaining different identities which can help to an extent.  LinkedIn and Plaxo remain notoriously professional while Facebook provides a place for both business and pleasure.  What smart users are now realizing is that Facebook also allows users to be segment their lists to separate family from friends and business from pleasure and there are of course the notorious Facebook Fan Pages for creating a separate business identity on the social giant.  Even Twitter allows you to segment your followers bringing greater relief to ongoing multiple personality social disorders and Google’s new networking circles require you to put all your connections into circles. 

Our suggestions for help with multiple social personality disorders are pretty simple.  The first is to get organized.  Segment your friends and followers on the various social networks so you can post the right stuff to the right people.  The next would be to make sure that the social networking buttons on your website are delivering people to the right online personality for a connection.  Your Follow Me button on your business website or blog should lead to your business’s social identity while your personal blog should connect to your personal online profiles. 

Social networking doesn’t have to be chaotic, separated and challenging to be effective.  Simplify your plan and update your social follow buttons to streamline your online identities.

Breaking Down the Search Marketing Strategy

Perhaps it is because social networking has been bundled into SEO by many professionals that do-it-yourselfers of the world get confused on where keywords do and do not belong in their social encounters.  Search engine optimization has on-site elements like keywords, Meta tag optimization and quality website content and then eventually moves to off-site elements like link building and content marketing that help to reinforce the relevancy of the on-site efforts.

A lot of off-site optimization elements fall more under the social media marketing terminology while also working to help deliver more relevancy to the on-site SEO aspects.  Social media marketing can include everything from social bookmarking to building profiles on different professional and social networks.  The actual act of ‘being social’ is more of the marketing part of the equation. Confused?

The Simple Social Strategy Breakdown

Setting up profiles on social networks provides the valuable opportunity to link to your website, to tastefully include your keywords in your profiles and to dominate more organic search placements with custom urls for varying networks, but your actual engagements on those social networks should be more about making connections with customers, strangers, employees and even your competition.  This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for your keywords in your posts and links to your site, but it shouldn’t be your daily mission to figure out a way to use your keywords in every status update.  Only once you stop focusing on pushing keywords and links will you truly see the rewards of social media marketing in your search marketing strategy.

Ultimately, once an optimized profile is set up on a social network, your main goal should be to share relevant content that uses great anchor text to show the search engines that the website at the other end of the train is relevant to this topic.  As your website gathers more links from social networking sites, it is going to gain positions in the search engines. The big BUT here is that your followers, fans, likes and retweets aren’t going to come if all you are sharing is link after link after link.  Be real.  Post for real.  Avoid making a link fest to your website.  Include content about you and your business, but ask other people in your organization to write posts, share information about employees (at their discretion please), about clients, about failures and successes and just get involved with conversations.

The Best Button for the Job

One great way to increase your social circle online is to make it easy for your website visitors to find you on the social platforms that they are a part of.  With free Social Media Buttons, like our favorite, the SocialFollow button, you can easily lead your visitors from your website or blog to your online profile where they can get an inside glimpse of your organization and see what you and your business is really all about.

When it comes to deciding on your social identity, a lot of questions come to mind.  What social circles are you going to run with? Are you just going to hang with anyone or will you be selective of your peeps? When is it okay to block an un-cool follower and how often will you be hitting the social scene? All good questions and all should be addressed when coming up with your social media marketing plan.

For the party animals and even the social butterflies, all the invitations to go social can be a bit too attractive.  Let’s Connect is like the drug of the socialistas, but you shouldn’t join every network that you are invited to and even though you may not want to, there are some social networks that just aren’t good for business and you should decline the invitation.  Not every party is a blast, so you need to evaluate your would-be audience and the potential of each social networking situation. 

To research a social networking site before adding it to your social media marketing plan you need to do some checking.  Find out whom else is at this party and if they are people who you want to connect with and who would be interested in your brand.  Be sure that your presence and involvement would be a benefit to your business and your followers’ lives.  Most social networks have a particular demographic that they cater too, some broader than others, and this information should be taken into consideration as well.  Additionally, just like you wouldn’t go to a party that was serving the wrong kind of food and drinks, you shouldn’t hop into a social circle that is promoting products or services that you wouldn’t promote on your own website. 

Being a party animal also takes a lot of time and energy.  Before you start jumping on every invitation for every social network, make sure you have the stamina to keep your involvement welcome.  Social spam is not an option when it comes to building your social status online, so you have to show that you are invested in your social interactions and not spread yourself too thin across too many lines of social networking.  On the same lines, you have to be ready to change your social attire and conversation for each network you visit.  You wouldn’t wear your tennis shorts to a meeting with investors, meaning you need to mind your audience on particular network and practice the proper etiquette of the truly sophisticated social butterfly.

As always, we encourage you to let yourself be found on the networks you are already a part of by adding the free social media marketing button from SocialFollow to your website.  This snazzy FollowMe button lets your online visitors find you on a mutually convenient platform without the need for RSVPs.

Even the most well intentioned businesses can make simple mistakes in the social network that can earn them the label of Spammer and like permanent marker, this label will take a good bit of time and scrubbing to go away.  The truth is, you can never really know how your audience will receive your message, but you avoid common mistakes on the social platform.

For starters, don’t go social just to get links to your website.  Do something more constructive like article marketing to gain links.  If you aren’t going to maintain your social profile and interact on a networking site, then you probably shouldn’t start an account at all.  To get the most out of your social efforts, you have to actually be social. 

Most people can spot social spam from a mile away.  Twitter accounts that consist of nothing more than RSS feeds and links to one website and Facebook fan pages that only run off the Twitter account and blog are all pretty good indicators that there isn’t really a human behind the account.  What is even funnier is that the followers and fans you get from a social network account run on spam are usually spammers themselves so all your spam isn’t really bringing home any bacon anyway.

Which brings us to followers, fans and followings; social media isn’t a popularity contest.  Or at least it shouldn’t be.  Don’t hop on ship and start following everyone and their brother so as to get their brother and everyone to follow you.  You need to have a vested interest in your followers and fans.  Interact and communicate with your peeps on an individual level and as a whole.  You should post real posts with no links and no sales at least once a day if not more.
 
If you go to all the trouble to send people to your social networking profiles, via the free FollowMe button from SocialFollow of course, don’t just send a bunch of spam and sales pitches.  Keep your interaction real and reap the true rewards of social media marketing which are a loyal customer base and a strong reputation.

There is no doubt that social networking has changed the game of marketing over the last few years.  Companies that were once in hiding are coming out and talking about their brand and bringing a refreshing dose of transparency to their industries and individual businesses.  Social media marketing or social network marketing is a great platform for customer feedback and employee interaction.  Google in particular has made it easier than ever to monitor your online presence with their custom alerts that notify you when a post about you or your business makes it to the World Wide Web providing you an opportunity to make direct contact with the blogger, customer or employee directly about any issue; good or bad.  There is also an emotional bond that is created with all your followers in networking circles that has a lasting impression on your brand. 

Additionally, social marketing has become a great source for lead generation.  Facebook fan pages, Twitter posts and professional connections on Linked In create a buzz about your business and make it increasingly easy for information about your business to spread via word of mouth on the web.  With the proper attention, social media marketing can greatly expand your brand and customer base in a fairly short amount of time.  When one customer fans your page, their friends see this action and many will take the time to see what your business is all about and they may even like your page too or order from your store, even better.  The rippling effect from social media marketing can be outstanding.

The biggest value in social marketing is building your brand.  Using your social networking identities to build strong ties with your customers and employees and to communicate directly with your already loyal customers is absolutely priceless.  Running contests that ask your social media audience to get personal with photos or information let you spend quality time with your customers and strengthening your brand even more.  There is no doubt that social media marketing is good stuff for businesses.

Now, all of this brand building and direct contact of social media marketing is great for business, but it shouldn’t be your brands only identity.  That’s why we have websites and all of your social identities should be sending people back to your website for some kind of conversion or sale, but where a lot of businesses, bloggers and affiliates are going wrong is that they are losing their brand on the website level.

To steer clear of losing your online identity when being social, visit your home page and take a look.  Has your company’s home page become a billboard for your social media identities or is it a clear beacon for your business and brand? If your social media buttons take up the majority of your upper-fold, it may be time to rethink your real identity and your page design. 

Obviously we greatly support the use of social marketing and social media buttons, but your buttons should not overshadow your brand.  Don’t sacrifice your website just to get shared, liked and re-tweeted.  If what you are delivering is good, it will get shared even with the smallest of social media buttons.   Keep your social media icons under control.  Of course we suggest the sleek and discreet SocialFollow button.  This is a free button that lets people find you on the network of their choice, but it doesn’t take over your website with social site promotions.  In the end, you want your website to promote your products, services or information, not be an advertisement for social networking sites.

Even more interesting about site load times is Google’s big announcement that they will be using page load time in its page rank algorithm.  If your website is busy loading several small icons and images, while your competitors popped up, you can be sure that Google is going to give the competition the higher position.  Further research conducted by Google also strengthened the position that people simply don’t want to wait when they surf the Internet when they discovered that even though a research group thought they would like 30 search results returned on a keyword search, very few of those same individuals waited for all 30 search results to load because it took longer than the traditional 10 results. 

There are several ways to increase your website’s load time.  Images traditionally take the largest amount of time to load.  By hosting your own images and by keeping your images small, you can greatly reduce the load time of your page.  Also reducing the number of plug-ins on your site can help to reduce loading speeds.  Another great way to speed things up is to lose those bulky social networking icons and streamline your social networking button. 

When you link to each of your social networks via separate images and links you are increasing your page clutter and your site’s load time.  Especially when you make those Facebook and LinkedIn buttons dominate your page.  The larger the image the larger the load time and the larger the load time the greater the impact you will see on your site exits and lost customers, ultimately affecting your bottom line.

The beauty of SocialFollow’s FollowMe buttons is that they don’t cost you valuable loading time and at the same time they allow you to add far more than the top 3 social networking buttons to every page of your website without using your entire sidebar.  You can add hundreds of social networking icons and links to your one button and if you have a niche network not yet listed in the SocialFollow database, you can add it in minutes and have it on your button in no time.  Even better is that the Social Follow button is totally free, a great way to save both time and money.  Don’t let your social networking icons drive customers away due to slow site loading times.  Add the button that won’t bog down your page. 

It is no secret that the more you spread yourself across the World Wide Web, the more exposure you will get.  All this is generally to the end of getting more traffic or conversions, depending on the function and purpose of your web identity.  Social networking has become the most common platform for addressing potential visitors directly and has proven to be an extraordinarily effective marketing strategy.  Making yourself easily accessible on a variety of social networking platforms should then be on your web design and even your blog design must have lists.

The SocialFollow button has made putting all your social media buttons in one location a snap already, but the placement of your SocialFollow button will deliver even more exposure and show how much you value social relationships if placed properly.  Hence, the web shui.

There is a theory in conversions that the bigger the button, the more action it will receive.  While this is true of call to action buttons that actually create conversions and sales, the rule doesn’t always apply to your social media buttons.  The truth is, your social media button is not going to take someone to your shopping cart and for this reason it should not be treated like a call to action button.  Social media buttons are means for establishing lasting relationships with your visitors, beyond sales and conversions. 

You don’t need gigantic banner sized social media buttons, but the placement of your social media button is important.  Just like call to action buttons, you will want your social media button to stand out from the surrounding content and you want it to be recognizable.  Liberal use of whitespace is going to add to the use of your button.  Placing your social media button in different areas on your website or blog is going to allow people to make their decision to follow you on a social platform at any point in their visit to your website. 

Great web shui for your social media button placement include putting your Follow Me button in the upper fold of your web pages, or in the upper to middle regions of your sidebar and including it at the end of your blog posts.  Why at the end? Usually a reader will decide they want to stick with you AFTER they have read what you have to say.  Another great spot is to include your social media button with your newsletter conversion box as people who sign up for your newsletter may find following your updates via Twitter and Facebook more appealing than emails.

Okay, we have two main changes:

• We have moved to new hosting; it is very good and very reliable. I could say more, but just know that we have made done tremendous amounts of research through many sleepless nights and we are now satisfied.
• We have analytics. You can see how many times your button has been seen — and not from now on, but for the last month. These are real time graphs. They update every 15 seconds.

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Now, on with other news. If you have a feature you want — request it! We love requests because we then know what you actually want, not what we think you want.

We have a whole list of improvements that will be rolling out, you can check back here for the updates — but before you go.

The same team that has created Social Follow has developed a new very exciting project, and we think you might be interested as well. it’s name is RealStatistics.com. It is an online graphing solution and definitely worth checking out.

Kerry Jones
SocialFollow.com Lead Developer

http://twitter.com/SocialFollow

Enjoy and as always, thanks for following us!

Rafferty Pendery
Social Follow

Technorati Tags: Social Follow, Social Follow Twitter

When Social Following is properly managed, visitors to your site(s) feel more inclined to use you when seeking out someone to solve whatever problem they are trying to solve. This is because you provided them an easy way to get to know you as a real human vs. Bob, the VP for Administrative Affairs in Diplomatic Affairs (ok, maybe the title is a little extreme). Nonetheless, when executed properly, a Social Following strategy can make the difference between a product that sells 20 units and one that sells millions.

Social Follow’s button allows you to have all social networks in one button.

More on Social Following soon…

Rafferty Pendery
Creator of Social Follow