Advertising Your Facebook Contest

We all love a good contest and we enjoy winning them even more! Facebook contests are a lot of fun and can really boost a business online. They also allow you to easily collect data about your fans, data you can use to better target ads and specific posts.
There are right way and wrong ways to promote your contest. Setting up and posting once or twice, leaving the rest to fate is wrong. Actively promoting it and advertising your Facebook contest is the right way to go. You’ve spent time and money on your contest app and set-up, and you want to make sure everyone has a chance to enter. Posting the link and hoping they will come isn’t a realistic approach. Active promotion is.
When promoting/advertising your Facebook contest, consider the following:
1. Pin the link to the top of your Facebook page. While I know that research shows that fans do not typically come back to the actual page after liking it, you never know who may be visiting for the first time. It’s prime real estate on your Facebook page and a perfect way to showcase your contest.
2. Promote a post announcing the contest. This is one of the few times I think using promoted posts is okay. You want to make sure everyone knows about your contest. Be careful, though, because any pictures used are subject to Facebook’s 20% text rule. Check out this tool before you upload your image to make sure it’s compatible.
3. Runs a news feed-only ad and target people not currently connected to your Facebook page. The promoted post will, by default, show up to just your fans and their friends (though there are other targeting options available). Running a news-feed only ad allows you to target potential followers, bringing new fans to your page. With this type of ad you specifically target a certain market or group of people.
4. Promote it on other social media sites & your website. If you have accounts on Twitter or Google Plus or Pinterest, create a contest post and share it frequently. While you have a small percentage of fans following you on all platforms, the majority do not. With a different audience on each platform you want to maximize potential new fans and contest participants. Make sure you also have a link or graphic on your website to catch those who may not be connected with you via social media.
These four tips will ensure your Facebook contest has the best chance for success. Have you found other successful ways to promote a Facebook contest?  If so, please share in the comments!

The Psychology of ‘Free’ on Google Plus

This is an article that explores the perception we have of ‘value’ and ultimately why giving is the smart move to make in business. It also may offer some explanations why there is been SO much giving on Google+ – it is a great opportunity to build a community, and free may well be essential to build trust. Introduction When I was young I remember being told that if something was ‘free’ it probably wasn’t worth much. The idea being that if something is free then why the heck not charge for it? There is going to be some truth to that, but very often it is when either their is an abundance (like air) or a person cannot see the value in something, or cannot do anything this ‘it’ themselves so they give it away without any intent. I recall a formative business moment with my father when he took me on a Sunday drive and he said “you need to see what other people haven’t.” I may be paraphrasing it but I recall the context very well. He had had someone dump a load of old, empty beer barrels on his land (he was a farmer) and told me the person dumping them simply didn’t know the value (something like £25 (about $35) a barrel at the time – yes, I actually recall it that well!). So, what is the point? Well, whether something has value is based on the perception you have about a thing, and it is not inherently within it. We see this in the gold market where a metal has become precious as there is a limited amount of it and considering it to be finite we can then attribute value based on what people are willing to pay (i.e. supply is limited and demand will therefore determine price). Obvious? Simple? Sure, but back to the example of the beer barrels, if someone a) doesn’t know or b) doesn’t have access to a network that would enable that sale to happen then the barrels won’t get sold on. At that time it was highly likely that the beer barrels were stolen, and then dumped as the person may well have know their value but was unable to ‘pass them on’ (the legal term for the illegal activity). Why? Because the only people who would buy 20 beer barrels were the people supplying the beer i.e. the brewers themselves, and they would not buy back stolen barrels from the thief or his mates. (I am certain some people will have faked the dumping and cut a deal with a landowner to ‘receive the reward’ etc, but we will leave that on.) What has this got to do with the value of free? Do you appreciate it when someone gives you a gift? Probably you would say ‘yes’. Well, that is ‘free’ isn’t it? i.e. it is free from a direct exchange of money. If you were given a new car, phone, or shirt you probably will have some unconscious association with a relative worth of that item. And yes, it would be lovely to have the gift of a new car with no strings attached! But there we have it, the strings. The invisible strings of the ‘free economy’ – if you are given a gift in any way it sets up an “temporary imbalance in the relationship”. These temporary imbalances even manifest as rewards when companies put in place systems e.g. to allow for a person/landowner to receive a sum of £25/$40 a barrel in the event someone dumps them on his land. Even though you got the barrels for free, they are worth something to the owner – free then becomes value. When you give something for free to members of a community you build relationships. Without ‘free’ they cannot taste the goods you have as they don’t yet trust you enough to try them out at a price, especially if there are alternatives available. Internet Marketers have known this for a long time and will give access to some content for ‘free’ and the you have the option to purchase the full monty. But I believe the online world is changing and people in Google+ are leading the way in encouraging the emergence of a new culture that is much more about community than ever before (Internet Marketing tends to be much more transactional than relational, in my view). Chatting with David Amerland about this, and in relation to the free content on the PYB site, he said “free raises the bar for everyone”. This is quite a profound statement – it means that is there is access to enough good quality food for everyone in one restaurant then why would you choose to eat somewhere where you have to pay? So, what happens, more and more people set up their own restaurants but also start to give the main courses for free. If however a person wants something ‘special’ that requires more time and attention, then of course they will then be happy to pay for that bespoke ‘meal’. This is a great way to get a virtual restaurant established – if you had try to charge then people would simply look for ‘free’ elsewhere as the trust, the flavour of that ‘free’ had not yet been tasted. But once many people have enjoyed meal after meal, touchpoint after touchpoint, they are part of that community. So, when does free turn into paid? Well, all along the way there is the potential for ‘paid’, especially when looking at consultancy, coaching, training etc. It would not be very wise however to pull the old switcheroo and try and ‘turn the tables’ on them… But there we have it, they are in your restaurant and at a table. And you as a business are serving them. You may we serving them for free, but when the time comes for a desert and coffee many people will look at the menu and because you are there, and they like you and they respect you and they love your restaurant and the people they have around them, they order. Yes, they buy something from you. Just like why people have cheese and wine at book launches, people are guilted a little into buying a bookfrom you. Yes, I said guilted – it is because the temporary imbalance of them taking all the free food needs to be resolved within them and the way to do this is to buy something. So how does this imbalance become balanced once more? There are two people who I listen to very carefully, the first being Guy Kawasaki. When I interviewed him in January 2013 he said openly that he gives people great content all year and then when e.g. he brings out a book people kind of feel obligated they should buy it i.e. cheese and wine leading to a book sale. For a long time I have been missing a word when I say a statement re: activities on Google+ – ‘Make it about them’. But it was Chris Brogan who gave me the elusive word I had been missing all along ‘Make it about the community’. Chris sees that it is fine to sell to people in the community. And if people love the food you dish up then they will happily pay for it. I think on Google+ the community ‘gives you Search’ and you don’t even have to consider selling to it directly. See here for more on that. Applying this to Google+ There has been a culture of free for a long time on Google+, and this has been essential to (as David Amerland says) raise the bar from the old way of being. Free enables a relationship to begin, a community to engage freely without concerns that they will get a bill. And they never will get a bill but they will ‘feel’ something and want to do something about it. So, there are two ways here: 1. You create a product and you charge people from within the community. This is very much as Ronnie Bincer has done with his Hangout Mastery community. If you create a product for your community and you charge for it, Assuming it is the kind of deal people want, the type of tasty course they would enjoy, then people will tend to buy it. But what happens if someone else then decides to offer the same kind of thing for free for which you are now charging? Well, here is the thing, it is not only about the product, it is about the relationship you have with the person who has created it. That relationship has tens or more likely hundreds of touchpoints – +1s, comments, shares, emails, hangouts, texts, real life meetings etc – and for you not to want to continue to eat at the restaurant would simply feel odd to you. Loyalty manifests in behaviour. And the other way… 2. Keep ‘giving’ and enable the community to love what you do SO MUCH that they will amplify your message, reaching outwards beyond the confines of the community. Word of mouth and its modern equivalents, enables message to spread i.e. other people do your marketing for you. So, people not only want to eat in your restaurant but will encourage others too. Free works. Free can enable trust, and from trust your reputation can turn you into a authority. There is a problem, however as one of the issues with everything being ‘free’ all the time is that new people coming into Google+ cannot believe their luck, and in fact, don’t believe it and think it is too good to be true. Instead they will end up paying for a less beneficial alternative as only a madmen or fools would give so much away for free. What then is my approach? Give, give so much that people start to wonder if your are mentally unwell! For those people who are ‘scouts’ (like me) our self appointed role is to access and interpret new information and then communicate it back to the tribe in a way that makes it easy to understand and assimilate. But maybe I don’t ‘tell everything’….(shock! horror!) Someone recently approached me saying that they believed I had been” holding back” on the lil guy, and the truth is this: After hundreds of videos, articles, courses, GifTips, and interviews I really have answered every question I’ve been asked about how I think and approach Google+. If you check out the Plus Your Business site, there is a whole area with content for free for business as well. (relaunching later this week). I do, however, have many other presentations, spreadsheets and information that I use when working with clients. My philosophy is this: I will give the information on everything that any individual needs to know for free. I will also do my best to reply to any comment or email without any consideration of charging for the information, or my view on this. I do believe, however, that after that exchange, if the person is either a business or someone who will make money from it e.g. consulting using the information, then it is only fair to charge. The same applies if this information is packaged into a product that will help more people ‘up their game’ too. But even then, ‘free’ may well be the way to go for your nearest and dearest, as doing the right thing by the community is the priority. Conclusion We can all see ‘things’ are changing on Google+ – it is growing up. There are new pockets of culture emerging, and the adventurers ways of the earlier pioneering days are not known to the people who are now arriving. There is a great opportunity, however, to take ‘free’ up a level of two and that is what will happen next. Everything has its time and with my own content I will be sharing ‘free’ in a new way very soon – I am hoping it will make life a lot easy for people learning and developing their skills on Google+ too.

Twitter 201: Moving Beyond the Basics

Twitter has many nuances that can make it seem overwhelming when you’re new. Now that you’ve mastered the basics, what’s next? My friend Tara Kusumoto had some questions for me on how to use Twitter beyond the basis so I thought I’d share the questions and answers with you. I hope this Q & A will help demystify Twitter and find what’s next to help your Twitter account flourish.



From Tara: In my opinion, there are plenty of posts/resources out there about Twitter 101 (the basic how-to’s, posting, etc.) I’m not a total newbie, instead, where I (and many of my colleagues/friends) need help is more around Twitter 201: how to be more engaging and more efficient when interacting on Twitter. And as a subset, I’m curious about which specific tools to use to be more targeted and focused with the type of Tweets I’m seeing/interacting with.”






Below are Tara’s questions, which fit under the umbrella of “improving how to really engage with people” in this Twitter 201 post.

Question 1— What is your advice for effectively creating/using lists?


Twitter lists focus your time so they are important in that they help you be more efficient. The key to a good Twitter list is keeping them small about ten to twelve people per list is ideal. I like to give my lists fun names but keep your lists targeted and specific. Keep in mind that the people you add to your lists will see the titles so you want to be professional. Also, you’ll want to use names that will help you find them for future usage so don’t just number them. Be specific.



Some suggestions for lists:


1. People you want to tweet every time you’re on Twitter


2. Relevant people in your industry


3. New people you just met (People I want to get to know – rotate this list)


4. Blogs you like to follow


5. People who tweet great content that you can retweet
Question 2— What tools do you use to help manage/filter so much information and make sure you’re seeing what’s most important?


I have certain columns that I keep open in TweetDeck that organize my Twitter experience.


1. Mentions


2. Notifications


3. My fab people list that I want to follow closely.


4. Hashtag column if I’m working on something targeted.


I start by replying to my Twitter mentions as I try to respond to everyone that tweets me. I do my best to respond to questions and thoughtful tweets. This processes evolves over time. If you have a blog and it hopefully becomes more popular, it isn’t practical or smart to simply tweet a “thanks” tweet to each person that has shared your blog posts. It makes your Twitter stream look spammy to people who check your tweets.


I also look through the notifications to see if new people have followed me as well as what content is being tweeted.
Question 3— Would you recommend using something like TweetDeck, HootSuite, Radian6 — just one or a combination?


I use TweetDeck for all my personal tweeting and have for years. I also use HootSuite for work on other accounts that I manage on social media. If you manage more than one account or profile, it’s best to have the other accounts on separate Twitter clients then you know when you are on TweetDeck, you are tweeting your own personal tweets. If you’re an individual tweeting, you don’t need more than one. I would try Hootsuite and TweetDeck and see which interface appeals to you the most and does what you want.
Question 4— Can you offer some tips for the best way to track people who are high priority to follow/that you’re most interested in?


I use Twitter lists for this but also go to people’s Twitter page to make sure I don’t miss tweets from my VIPs. I always make sure I follow people right away if I’m interested in them. If I’m on the go and receive a tweet that I don’t want to miss responding to, I’ll favorite it so I can go back to it. You can also email a tweet to yourself. You could also create a custom timeline in Twitter to track a topic or person. From Twitter: ”There are four types of timelines available, all of which look and feel like timelines on twitter.com:”
User Timeline: Display public Tweets from any user on Twitter.
Favorites: Show all Tweets a specific user has marked as favorites.
List: Show Tweets from public lists that you own and/or subscribe to.
Search: Display customized search results in real time.
Question 5— Like all social media, images are really important; what is the best way to include pictures?


I add photos to Twitter in a few different ways. I add them straight to a tweet in Tweetdeck and I tweet them from Pinterest. The correct size for Twitter is 2:1 aspect ratio, I’ve been using 876 pixels by 438 pixels. Here’s an example of a tweet with an image that I sent with a larger image, it still looked awesome on Twitter and led to a great conversation with New York Times Best-selling author Chris Bohjalian about alpacas. I didn’t even know he followed me. Random conversations like this are part of the charm of Twitter.



Question 6— Like Facebook and Pinterest, I can get really distracted by Twitter; just a quick search or Tweet and then an hour’s passed! This is similar to my question above: any tips or tools for being more efficient with time spent on Twitter?


The best way to stay focused Twitter is to set a time limit and use a timer and use a task list. Sometimes I do both together. If I only have a short window of time, I respond to five or six people who’ve tweeted me. For my task list, I will:
Follow people back who’ve followed me after checking their bio
Tweet new followers
Find new people to follow
Unfollow people who’ve unfollowed me


Once a week, I use Social Bro to set the best times for tweets for the week. I have a complimentary version of Social Bro. It helps me focus on these tasks quickly and efficiently. You can send your “best times to tweet report” to HootSuite and Buffer. Use the “what your followers talk about” and “your followers top hashtags” to help you decide what type of content to tweet.







Question 7— How frequently should you tweet?


Honestly, I tweet as much as I want and I don’t really have a set amount of tweets per day. I schedule about eight tweets per day into Buffer, I carefully put this group together to have variety and make sure that my Twitter content is focused on things that fit my personal brand like marketing and social media how-to’s. I also like to mix in random things that I think are fun or entertaining. Twitter should be fun, right? I try to respond to tweets two or three times per day and touch base with friends on Twitter. I also share content from tribemates on Triberr so I’ll go in first thing in the day and schedule about five tweets to go out. Resource: What is Triberr? I will repeat certain tweets once or twice to reach certain time zones but I don’t do that with all my tweets. I use Buffer’s analytics that show my top tweets and repeat them.






Question 8— What are the best tools for following conversations?


I use TweetDeck for everything including TweetChats. You can also try websites like Twubs to follow certain hashtags. Here is the Twubs page for #APEtheBook.









Question 9— How do you find, curate and share great content?


Answering this would be a whole post on its own! Following the right people on Twitter helps you find great content to share


Following the right people on Twitter helps you find great content to share




. One really easy way is to sign up for an email list that Guy Kawasaki and I started called HASO to “help a socialist out” and make it easy for people to find great stuff to share. We’re sending out a daily digest of great stuff we find. You can sign up here. Guy Kawasaki and I recently were guests on a workshop for Hubspot and shared our best tips for finding great content. This SlideShare provides lots of great information. To find great content, I recommended Pinterest, using Feedly and Goodreads.


8 Places You’re Guaranteed to Find Great Content to Tweet from HubSpot All-in-one Marketing Software


I hope this gives you some ideas to bump up your Twitter activity, become more efficient and give you more time to have fun tweeting. Let me know if you have questions in the comments below. If you liked this article, please sign up to receive my blog by email when I post new content and share to your favorite social networks.

5 Social Profile Changes to Drive Traffic to Your Website

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While your main focus on social media should be to connect and engage with your audience, fans, and customers, it doesn’t hurt to give them a few ways to click back through to your website from your social profiles.

Different social networks offer both obvious and not-so-obvious ways to help your fans and followers click through to your website. Here are five social profile changes you can make today to drive traffic to your website from social networks.

Twitter Bio Link

Twitter gives you the ability to add your website link in the website field of your profile. Unfortunately, this field doesn’t show up throughout Twitter. If someone does a search for businesses on Twitter, all they will see is the 160 character profile bio. This is why you need to add a link to your business in your profile bio as well.

Notice how Elite SEO stands out because they have not one, but two links in their 160 profile bio itself. You will probably only need to add one – just make sure it flows in with the rest of your profile description. Think of it as 160 characters to convince people to click on your link.

Facebook Short Description Link

Facebook allows you to add a website link to your business page. No one is going to see it unless they click the About link beneath your profile photo. This is why you need to add it to your Short Description. The number of characters you will have available to you is dependent on the number of custom tabs/boxes you have – pages generally start with a likes and photos box, with the ability to add more using apps from services like NORTH SOCIAL, AGORAPULSE, and similar companies. When you add your website link to the Short Description, it will show up front and center on your page like this.

This doesn’t work for all pages – some Facebook pages, such as those set up for local businesses, place your local information (pricing, address, phone number, etc.) in this place instead. If your page has the option to use a Short Description, be sure to optimize it with a link.

Facebook Cover Photo Link

The Facebook cover photo on your business page can be used to do more than just make your page stand out. It can be a great way to put another clickable link front and center on your page. In addition to adding your link on the image itself, you can add it to the cover photo description. This way, if people click on your cover photo, they will be able to click through to your website.

HubSpot, for example, makes their cover photo something that intrigues people to want to click on it, leading them to the description with a call to action and link.

Google+ Introduction Link

One of the many changes Google+ made to their profiles and pages last year was moving the links section down to the bottom. This means that if you want people to be able to click through to your website from your About tab, you’ll need to get that link up higher in your Introduction section. You can actually has as many links as you want in the Introduction – the best rule is to get it in as early as possible so people see it sooner.

In addition to adding a link to your Introduction, you can also add it to your cover photo’s description, similarly to how you would with Facebook. This way, if people click your cover photo, they’ll find a link to your website too.

LinkedIn Showcase Pages

It’s hard to get a link at the top of your LinkedIn company page, especially now that the website link is in a section that is pushed beneath your company page’s status updates. If you have products, you can create a showcase page for each of your products. Your showcase pages show up in the right sidebar of your main company page. When people click through to a particular product, they’ll see the link to it right below the cover photo for the page.

Showcase pages are much more impressive than the individual product listings under the products tab of your company page. So if you have a product, be sure to add a showcase page for it today. Just go to your company page, hover over the dropdown next to the edit page, and you’ll see the create a showcase page link. These pages can also be used for services.

What other areas of your social profiles and pages do you add links to increase traffic to your website?

Infographic: State of Social Business 2013 and Outlook for 2014

This past year has been a busy one for me and Brian Solis on the research front. We’ve published the following:

Report on the six stages of social business evolution
Report on the true state of social business in 2013,
An ebook on seven success factors of social business strategy
An image-rich slide deck complete with all the graphs and charts you need to benchmark where you are compared to other social businesses.


Brian and I recently introduced an infographic that summarizes high level findings across all of our work in 2013 (scroll down to see it below). And the key finding is that while organizers are making significant headway in terms of building out their social efforts, they are far from realizing real business value.


My outook for 2014 is that many more organizations will overcome the stigma of “social” and seek ways to articulate connections with customers and employees into their business. In just the last half of the year, we’ve worked with several organizations that are doing the hard work of connecting their social efforts to business value — it sounds easy to connect the dots but actually building the organization, governance, and process to do this will be most of the focus in 2014.


It isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t have the appeal of new consumer bright shiny objects or excite of a tech IPO. But this is where the real value will be created, real benefits will be built. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, a bit of gut-wrenching leaps of faith as employees and customers are empowered, but hopefully in a year we’ll have seen key numbers like the percent of companies associating social with business value increase from today.


Highlights from the State of Social Business Infographic


Companies are organizing and formalizing social media strategies into social business strategies…
78% of companies have a dedicated social media team. This is up from 67% two years ago.
Social media teams have grown from 11 people in 2010 to almost 16 in 2013.


Social business strategies are spreading across the enterprise…
Social media headcount across the enterprise has more than doubled at the largest companies from 20 in 2010 to 49 in 2012.
According to our research, there are 13 different departments across the enterprise with at least one person dedicated to social media.
The majority of resources are allocated to marketing at 73%, but as you can see, social media covers almost every major function. Now, whether or not social media is organized and integrated, well, we know that it’s not really.


Marketing = 73%

Corporate communications = 66%

Customer support = 40%

Digital = 37%

Social media = 35%

HR = 29%

Product/R&D = 16%

Advertising = 16%

Customer/User experience = 15%

IT = 14%

Legal = 9%


Companies are trying social business to positive business outcomes…
About 50% of companies say social business has improved marketing optimization, customer experience and brand health.
Nearly one in four have actually seen an increase in revenue.


Companies though have a long way to go…
Many social business programs lack a strong foundation.
Only 17% of companies identify their social strategy as mature.
52% of companies say that executives are aligned with the overall social strategy.
Just 26% of companies approach social media holistically (operating against a cross-enterprise level strategy.)


To succeed, build a foundation for social business…
Benchmark you program with Altimeter’s Social Business reports (see below…underneath the infographic).
Document existing challenges and opportunities to address in 2014 and 2015 (we don’t move as fast as we’d like).
Align all social business efforts with business objectives and priorities.

Managing the Social Media Mix

The following is an excerpt from “Managing the Social Media Mix” an exclusive whitepaper brought to you by Oracle. Download the exclusive whitepaper now! This white paper provides a step-by-step guide for determining your strategy—and the proper mix of marketing channels—in social media. With it, you can use the time you have to efficiently define a balanced social media mix.

Eight Steps to a Better Social Media Mix

Social media is a continually evolving realm with amazing potential for business communications, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By following the eight steps outlined in this white paper, you can clearly make decisions about your social media mix and online communications strategy.

1. Gather Your Portfolio

Start by doing a quick inventory of the social media channels that you already use. If you are like most businesses, you will find that you already have different channels set up and managed by different people. Write each channel name on a Sticky Note: one for Twitter, Facebook, the company blog, e-mail, and any other online communications channel you use. (For the moment, don’t worry about social media channels you want to use in the future. Those will be covered in a later step.) Having this data in front of you can help you organize your channels by overall reach.

Figure 1. Gather your portfolio.

2. List Your Content

Inventory the kinds of information that you distribute through your social media channels, such as white papers, status updates, case studies, event information, customer service, and industry discussions. List each content type to make the first column of a table. As you make your list, keep in mind that—beyond different information—there are also different types of conversations you’re trying to foster with each piece of informational material.

Figure 2. List your content

3. Look Through Four Social Media Lenses

Four lenses—frequency and formality, the condensing funnel, the waterfall, and subscription size—offer different ways for you to look at your communications to generate new ideas and understanding about how social marketing works.

Figure 3. Look through four social media lenses. Lens 1: Frequency and Formality

On the content list from Step 2, add two columns, “Frequency” and “Formality.”

Frequency means how often you send a communication. Formality means the general level of resource investment the communication requires, how conventional it is, or perhaps how geared toward a strategic audience, response, or result. Frequency and formality tend to be inverse: formal messages go out less often; informal messages, more often.

Rank all your content by frequency and formality. For example, if you have 10 content types, rank each from 1 to 10. Your most frequent communication—say Twitter posts—ranks a 1, second-most frequent ranks a 2, and so on.

Now, rank the formality of each channel 1 through 10, as well. Formality is perhaps tougher to gauge than frequency, but remember, it’s a relative scale. Deciding whether e-mails are more formal than blog posts can start a good, strategic discussion with your team.

Lens 2: The Condensing Funnel

Consider whether or not your content funnels through your communication channels. For example, your organization might tweet everything, blog about industry trends, and use a newsletter mostly for promotions. Thinking of that content in a funnel that leads toward a business goal will highlight how and where content gets redistributed.

Overall, where does your funnel lead readers?

Lens 3: The Waterfall

As you think about the funnel, begin to think of content as a waterfall that runs through it. For example, some tweets may lead to blog posts, and some blog posts may lead to white papers. You want to highlight this flow, because it leads to better content development once you have an online communications strategy in place, as shown in Step 8.

As this relates to the first lens, you’ll see that formality often increases as you move down the waterfall.

Lens 4: Subscription Size

Ranking social media channels in terms of subscribers has a huge impact on your communications strategy, too. It takes time and effort to transition communities across social media, and attrition happens all the time.

Rank your channels by number of subscribers. Write the rankings on the Sticky Notes you made for each channel in Step 1.

Vine Vanity URLs: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

Twitter Launches Vanity URLs for Vine Users: “A profile URL is a unique Vine profile address accessible from the web. Once you select an available URL, you will be able to access your profile by visiting vine.co/[yourURL].”

“Selecting a custom URL allows you to share your profile easily and makes it easier for others to find and watch the videos you’ve created.”

Twitter Adds New Features to Twitter Alerts: Twitter has “added some new features to make Twitter alerts even more accessible to you. Now, on your iOS or Android app, you can go to a participating organization’s profile and easily subscribe to their alerts as push notifications by tapping on the bell icon.”

Twitter has “also added in-app notifications for iOS: when you’re browsing on Twitter, you’ll now receive a notification at the bottom of your screen when an alert is sent by an organization whose alerts you subscribe to.”

Windows Phone Releases Update to Facebook App: “The team behind the official Facebook app for Windows Phone” has released an update ”that significantly evolves the app’s notification capabilities, making it easier than ever to stay plugged in.”

“Now you can see what your friends have posted on your wall right from your Start screen. “

Here’s a cool social media tool worth noting:

Storytellit: a tool to make it easy to get customized suggestions for highly engaging posts; automate and schedule your posts; connect Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr; and reach your audience on multiple networks at once.

Check out Storytellit to grow your business or personal brand via social media.

Other Mentions

Introducing Social Media Marketing World: 60+ pros help you master social media marketing! Join Chris Brogan (co-author of The Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Michael Hyatt (author ofPlatform), Jay Baer (author of Youtility), John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies), Mark Schaefer (author of Tao of Twitter), Michael Stelzner (author ofLaunch) and experts from more than a dozen brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2014—Social Media Examiner’s mega-conference in beautiful San Diego, California.

Check out this overview of the conference or click here for more details.

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