The first few adjectives that came to my mind when I was doing my research on Ally Greer by scouring through all her social media platforms (a.k.a stalking her) were feisty, positive and funny. Let’s not forget of course her superb skills at being a community manager for Scoop.it. That’s the reason we desperately wanted to squeeze out some secrets about community management from her.
Ally currently holds the title of being the first and only community manager for Scoop.it and is based in sunny San Francisco. Over the past two years, she has been able to master the tricks of the trade – a feat that isn’t so easy considering the rate at which community management and digital marketing is developing. For starters, Ally herself wasn’t aware of community management as a profession and only had her dose of it while interning for Scoop.it back in college. Let me take you through a very insightful discussion that I had with Ally on community managers and how they can make full use of Scoop.it to build a stronger online community with their audience.
Hey Ally, could you share a little bit on your young career as a community manager and life at Scoop.it?
One part luck, one part thirst for learning and one part \”right-place-right-time\”, have all added up to the experience I have today. I have viewed the first two years of my career primarily as a learning experience – and I plan to continue with this mindset for the rest of my life! I\’m constantly turning to other community managers for advice and tips, as well as looking up to my bosses and colleagues and even some professionals completely outside of the field.
At Scoop.it, I lead the community management and content marketing departments. I\’m also in charge of customer support and happiness, as well as community building through advocacy programs, a three-tiered community model, and a meetup series that encompasses members both within the Scoop.it community and beyond it.
With your experience over the past two years, what do you think is the one thing that is constantly changing in community management?
Now, there are infinite tools and platforms that help build community through social media, content marketing, customer satisfaction, advocacy and so on.
You’ve been leveraging on Scoop.it yourself to build your own community of followers for your business. If you could tell community managers 3 reasons why they should use Scoop.it, what would they be and why?
Firstly, Scoop.it is topic-centric rather than user-centric. It allows you to follow topics that you or your community are interested in and connect with others who share the same interests.
Secondly, with Scoop.it\’s newsletter function, you can export your topic page as a newsletter which is a great way to engage brand advocates or evangelists with content that\’s related to your space or your brand. Collecting a group of advocates and providing them with content to share directly from Scoop.it into their inboxes is the easiest way to activate an ambassador program and share your content organically.
Thirdly, Scoop.it also serves as a social media hub. You can connect all of your social networks so that when you discover great content (through the Scoop.it suggestion engine), you can easily publish it to your Scoop.it page as well as to your social networks. Content shared is also indexed for search engines rather than just being lost in the internet the way a tweet of a link would be.
Any hunches on where you see community management going in the future?
It\’s easy to say that in the future we will all be more connected, have better ways to reach each other and to discover tools to figure out what our clients want from us, but I honestly am not sure where community management is headed. There are some community professionals who maintain that soon everyone will be a community manager, but in my opinion, that would actually lead to the demise of the field rather than the expansion of it.
5 Tips For Community Managers
Ally has also very kindly left us with 5 tips community managers should be following to make the most out of Scoop.it:
Make sure to connect all of your social media accounts so that publishing is easy and seamless.
Follow other topics and rescoop to connect with likeminded curators.
Customize your topic page to mimic the look and feel of your brand\’s website.
Optimize your Suggestion Engine with RSS feeds, custom social media profiles, SlideShare searches, saved Google searches etc, to make sure that you’re getting the best content possible.
Use the newsletter feature to activate your ambassadors.
If you can’t seem to get enough of her, check out Ally’s blog, follow her on Twitter, Google+ and Scoop.it of course.
The two most important things in content marketing are words (duh!) and visuals. A marriage made in heaven between these two items would surely get you the attention and virality that you’re looking for. But what keywords should you be using to attain the much-anticipated traction for your articles? This infographic created by Quick Sprout sifts through the top keywords and phrases that you should be using on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ to capture the attention of your audience.
The Best Words To Share On Facebook
Sure, common terms like “Deals” and “Discounts” are probably the first few things you would think of adding to your headlines to gain the attention of your audience. No surprise here. But to be perfectly honest, words like “Warns” and “Amuses” are pretty unexpected to be used to gain more shares, likes and comments, don’t you think?
It’s also good to take note of the simplest of terms that you should be using – “When”, “Where”, “Would”, “Tell Us” and “Post”. These key terms clearly encourage reactions by questioning your audience and persuasively urging them to engage with your content.
When Running A Contest Or Promotion On Facebook
Alarmingly enough, stay away from mentioning words that relate to a contest or promotion. On hindsight, these words do sound tacky, eh? Imagine reading a post along the lines of “Hey guys, we’ve got a contest for Mother’s Day where you get to win two tickets to the Maldives!” vs “Mother’s Day is just around the corner. Wouldn’t you want to surprise your mother with winning tickets to the Maldives?” Using the right terms and phrasing your content in a manner that encourages a response is bound to do just that.
Best Words To Share On Twitter
Personally, when I see tweets asking me to help them by retweeting or reposting a tweet, I get repulsed and usually avoid doing so. But it seems like the human race isn’t as mean as I am as countless researches have shown in statistics that tweets that contain “Please retweet” actually do get tons of retweets and see an increased in engagement. Give it a try if you must.
The Best Words To Share On LinkedIn
The universally overused keyword in headlines might just have to be “Effective”. The fact that it has been so overused is the reason why you should stay away from it, along with those other nine words. Keep to keywords and phrases with positive undertones, that you haven’t already come across a hundred times on the Internet today.
The Best Words To Share On Google+
These keywords couldn’t have been made simpler for us content marketers. These keywords couldn’t have been made simpler for us content marketers. As explained by Quick Sprout in the infographic, persuading your audience involves picking the right words and terms that would eventually affect their decision-making process.
If you’ve got your own stash of keywords or phrases that have been tried and tested successfully on social media, please do share it with us in the comments below!
The initial stages of starting up a business are often the hardest. There are several issues to consider in terms of marketing and budgeting. The most important one being the process of creating and maintaining your brand’s awareness level. How should you get noticed amongst your target audience in the most cost-effective way? Creating brand awareness through advertising and publicity can surely come easy but the awareness generated may not be sustainable in the long-term. Also, publicity in this sense does not come cheap at all.
Social media has made it so much easier engage with your target audience, which is key to maintaining your brand’s awareness. The problem is, all your competitors and their grandmothers are trying to engage with your target audience as well. You’re not the only one chattering in the Twittersphere, so making yourself heard becomes increasingly difficult.
Russ Laraway, head of SMB of Twitter recently shared a couple of Twitter tips on how small businesses can benefit from Twitter. It’s straight from the horse\’s mouth – so you know that this is advice that you can trust. You may have heard this advice before, perhaps this is a stamp of approval or a nod for you to continue. But it makes sense to us, and we hope it makes sense to you.
Right, so straight from Twitter – here are the five essential Twitter tips for small businesses!
If you’ve got more tips to share, leave a comment below or give us a shout-out at @BetaTwentyOne on Twitter! And yes – now that you’ve liked our infographic so much, it’s absolutely mandatory for you to go ahead and follow us. Here’s a link to our RSS Feed as well.
Do you think Russ missed out on any tips? What else would you tell small sized businesses just starting out on Twitter to do?
The entire realm of social media marketing has been buzzing about the significant drop in organic Facebook post views. The social media giant rolled out a new algorithm late last year, which has resulted in a significant decrease in post views for many Facebook pages. We’ve touched on this issue before here and since then, the numbers have continued to dwindle. The competitiveness of what goes into a user’s newsfeed is partially to blame with the continual bombardment of content from every direction. Thus the number and type of posts seen on one’s newsfeed would have to be tapered down.
It also seems that Facebook is heeding advice from the famous saying, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free”. More organisations are grudgingly moving towards paid posts in order to get their intended reach across to their target audience. Naturally, many have not taken to this unwelcomed change very well.
Don’t fret – we’ve got a solution that enables you keep track of all the updates you want to receive. Marketers can be sure to view updates from particular pages and consumers can keep an eye on particular brands or personalities on Facebook.
Create Lists
Facebook lists have been around for a while now but it still remains as an underutilized tool for many. Lists allow you to organize your updates according to different groups and the best part is that you get to see every single update from these pages. Making lists on Facebook is so simple, it would only take 5 minutes or less to set one up. Here\’s a quick how-to:
On the left side of your News Feed, you will see the heading ‘Interests’. Hover your mouse over it and click on ‘More’ to ‘Add Interest’.
Begin by adding pages, personalities or friends into a new list.
Once you have filled the list, you can move on to customizing the settings. Toggle between different visibility settings. Making a list public would allow your friends or anyone else to subscribe to your list and follow them.
To ensure that you are receiving all updates from these pages, edit your settings by clicking \’Manage List\” and ticking on all update types.
Quick wasn’t it? Facebook Lists will ensure you’re getting all the updates that have been previously sucked out of your News Feed. We often follow certain pages because of the content being produced, but now that Facebook has streamlined the News Feeds, we’re being robbed of these updates.
So share this post with your followers to help them keep track of your updates on Facebook. It’s much quicker than opening each page up one by one. Community managers can use lists to be updated about your brands in an efficient manner as well!
Over the past two weeks, Cancer Research United Kingdom (CRUK) raised over £8 million from the viral spread of barefaced ‘selfies’ on social media. The intriguing part of this campaign is that CRUK was no way involved in creating this social movement. So how did the British, Canadians, Americans and tons of other people around the world get involved in this (almost) global movement?
Some have speculated it was just pure luck that CRUK was linked to these barefaced selfies of women that were floating around the Internet. Frankly, even CRUK themselves have no inkling on who began it but have been more than thankful towards the influx of donations from netizens.
Aaron Eccles, Senior Social Manager of CRUK, was quoted as saying:
We don’t know where it came from.. Some people say it came from the Oscars, some people say it’s an Australian thing or a UK thing. But whatever happened, it started organically and just went a bit crazy.
Well going a bit crazy is quite an understatement.
Within 24 hours of the spread of #nomakeupselfie, CRUK raised over a million pounds. Some women posted ‘selfies’ while posing with a sheet of paper written with the words “Text BEAT to 70099 to donate £3” and others shared donation methods in their captions. The campaign was able to bring across the message of empowering women to feel self-confident in their most vulnerable state which in turn related to cancer patients.
While the buzz around the hash tag began primarily on Facebook, data from Keyhole showed that Twitter eventually became the most prominent social media platform used to spread the movement. This came as no surprise as hashtags did originate from Twitter way back in 2007 and is still very much a prominent feature. Facebook, on the other hand, implemented the use of hashtags on its timeline mid last year but it has yet to become anything close to success for the social media platform. Conversations around the #nomakeupselfie hashtag was mainly cancer related, which succeeded in garnering greater awareness for cancer research.
Despite being a movement that was initially based in the UK, conversations on the hashtag managed to scatter across the globe. The highest percentage of posts stemmed from the UK (28%), followed by in the US (14%) and Canada (12%). The viral campaign was also participated by citizens from several parts of Europe, Africa and Asia.
Surprisingly, 44% of total participation towards the campaign were by men, who instead went about wearing makeup (#makeupselfie) to raise cancer awareness. The ability to get everyone involved is the best way to make your campaign go viral we reckon.
Pointers for a Viral Campaign
Here are the takeaways we gathered from CRUK on kick-starting a viral campaign:
1. Have Authentic Content
Whether it’s for a good cause or to raise awareness for a particular issue, the message, idea or concept that you want to send across to your followers should be sincere.
2. Use the Right Social Media Tool
Twitter is the place where conversations happen 24/7. Viral movements have the ability to spread quickly with hashtags and with the new twitter update of tagging photos, it’s going to get even faster.
3. Track your conversations
Keeping an eye on what the world is saying about you helps. A lot. Try using Tagboard or Keyhole.
4. Let the campaign spread organically
Take a cue from CRUK – less is more. Don\’t impose your campaign onto your followers by flooding social media with all your posts.
5. Show gratitude & practice transparency
Show sincere appreciation for the support you have received and let them know how the funds will be used.
The £8 million you’ve raised with your #nomakeupselfie pics will help fund 10 clinical trials.
At the end of the day, CRUK has taught us to embrace the attention your campaign is getting and develop meaningful relationships with your audience.
Here are a couple of tweets we pulled of #nomakeupselfie! https://twitter.com/MTLAlouettes/status/449248213740953600 https://twitter.com/beckygarner/status/448835053716402176 https://twitter.com/MattFreshFM/status/448787560899158016 https://twitter.com/98FM/status/448736416889982977
Did you take a #nomakeupselfie as well? Share it in the comments!
