More work but more rewards for digital marketing these days. 50% of the visitors to this website are now coming here because of Twitter. 50%. So each month a few hundred visitors are coming here just from Tweets about our various courses. Twitter indirectly sells most of the training courses Mulley Comms does and Google searches do the rest.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Your future digital/social content strategy – What you need to do

1. Build pages that are search friendly:
You need good titles, good descriptions, well structured pages, fantastic and inspiring content. Yeah, just that. totally easy right? But at least you have a plan. So this blog post has “digital, content, strategy” as keywords in the title and the description will mention digital marketing and social too. Here’s a preview of them:

The post should tell people what needs to be done and so gives readers content that they feel is valuable and they might share that value on Twitter or Facebook. Use Google Keyword planner or other keyword research tools so see what people are searching for and use some of those keywords in your post/page. Unless you are a website that updates non-stop and Google visits you non-stop too, then it will be days but more likely weeks before this page starts performing well in Google. Weeks is a generation in digital. So social is going to help.

2. Create Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook headlines that are must-click in nature.
Social Media traffic is the quick hit. It is surge in nature. Lots of clicks in a very short time and then traffic falls off a cliff until you Tweet/Facebook about it again. This is the traffic surge from a link that was Tweeted the other day.

Social Media is the first line of attack nowadays with SEO the rear guard that comes in and finishes the job. For what’s on your website, you need to be strategic with the keywords so that over long periods of time, Google will bring you traffic. To get people in social media to click on links to this content though, you need to think like a PR person or a headline maker for a tabloid. The title of this post is useful to a degree, very findable in Google but what about social? What gets the clicks? Well what makes you click on things on Twitter or Facebook? What works for me are amazing stats and then a promise to reveal more. This post could be marketed/PR’d on Twitter as:

• Well written Tweets are generating thousands in revenue for me yearly. Here’s how:
• A single Facebook status update or Tweet can send 100s of visitors to my site. Some become clients. A guide for you:
• Cheatsheet: Writing good website content and creating great social media headlines = How to get business in digital.

Here is a great guide form Upworthy on how to cook great social media headlines. Social Media is noisy though so you also need to be strategic here. Timing is everything. Various tools like Buffer will help you to find the best times to Tweet/Facebook out during the day/evening and time updates to go out then during those “social media prime times”. Once you get a handle on that, line up the most important tweets and Facebook updates for the week/month then it becomes a good deal easier to have your content seen, shared and clicked.

And here’s the sell.

A post with good content that you spent an hour writing has to have some kind of action item! I’m doing a course on Social Media Content Creation on May 28th in Dublin. Why not book a place?

Recently Jamie Heaslip tweeted a link out about a project:

When Jamie Heaslip Tweets

It gets 9 Retweets and 11 favourites.

Since Jamie used Bit.ly as a way to link, we can measure the clicks: https://bitly.com/1eh2TAL+

So it got 1096 clicks and you can see all of them were in the first few hours and then nothing.

1096 lifetime clicks

400 in first hour. Bit.ly timestamp is EDT, 8pm EDT = 1pm Ireland. (add a + to any Bit.ly link you see and you too can see the stats)

Clicks on a Jamie Heaslip Tweet

So 1% of Jamie’s followers clicked that link. 99% didn’t. We could argue that it was a Saturday so less clicks but sport fans might be tuned in more that day too though and just before 1pm would seem like a good time, no?

So what if you’re just a small fish in a big pond?

Have a look at this Tweet from Sex Siopa, a Sex Shop looking for help. Boy do they get it:

Sex Siopa 134 RTs

133 Retweets later and a few new followers for them. They get mentioned on Broadsheet.ie and Joe.ie and other places. They seem small and genuine so people in a way are more interested in helping them out. To date they only have 401 followers but this small fish makes a lot of waves in the big pond.

133 Retweets means that Tweet was easily shared into the timelines of 40,000 ore more people. (The average active Twitter user is followed by about 2-300 accounts.)

So being rough about the numbers, that sex shop with all their RTs got half as much reach as Jamie Heaslip’s Tweet. So you don’t necessarily need to have big numbers if you have a genuine message to share or if the message is fun or controversial or anti-establishment.

Details of the next course on Digital Strategy.

This course has now ended. You can see other Digital Marketing Courses here. If you want to add your name to future training courses, fill in this form.

1. What’s in a digital strategy? Overview
2. Understanding your consumer – technological and behavioural insights and persona development
3. Channel planning – Navigating the modern media landscape
4. Setting objectives – what to measure and how to measure it

Your trainer is Damien Mulley.

Pricing:
Cost of the training is €137. 50% payment required by October 14th. We take cheque or we can take credit card over the phone. A 50% cancelation fee applies if you cancel less than three days before the workshop.

Max 11 places per course. Bring a laptop or iPad with the Facebook Page Manager app installed.
Yes, this course can be done as in-house training too.

You can see other Digital Marketing Courses here. If you want to add your name to future training courses, fill in this form.

Venue: To be decided

Time/Date: March 2nd, 2011. 10am to 12pm

If you want to present a quick case study, email me or leave a comment. This post will be updated when speakers are confirmed.

Here’s Drew’s take on his week of letting Twitter and Facebook decide for him on certain things.

Facebook tests a new box on profiles that shows all the Pages you’ve liked.

Twitter makes you a better CV maker? You’re still making CVs though…

Google Small Business has a blog. Hopefully some good tips on the way from them.

Good analysis of the top Facebook Pages in Ireland from Brendan.

So no new records on Twitter for the World Cup final.

Location-based classifieds. Twitter mixed with Foursquare for Craigslist?

Facebook tool that allows you to get more data about the fans on your Facebook Page. See are they talking about you.

Mobile video capture is obviously on the rise.

What three things should you do in social media? Well first is listening.

Ways of figuring out more about those who follow you on Twitter.

Official stats from Facebook themselves.

Facebook is the largest publisher of display ads in the U.S. beating Yahoo! 176 billion display ads, up from just 70 billion a year earlier.

Interesting idea. Using staff for your media instead of buying ads.

I’ve been asked about doing another Measure It! for Wednesday July 7th from 10am to 12pm. If there is interest we can do one. Ideally we need about 30 people to register interest to make it worthwhile. We’ll have at least two presentations and as usual, a task to do as well.

Please leave a comment over there –> if you want to attend.

• 71% of users looked at adverts on their Profile pages, 31% of users looked at adverts on the News Feed page (homepage).
• Users pay more attention (53% vs. 31%) to page updates in their News Feed Wall rather than adverts to the right-hand side of the Wall.

So we might have banner ad blindness going on around the web and maybe Google Ads on the right side of results don’t get much love but it seems for Facebook so far, ads work and people pay attention to them.

More importantly in my view is that people are naturally paying attention to information that shows up in their News Feed and a business is allowed to send their updates to this News Feed when someone Likes/Becomes a fan of the Business Page. So set up your Facebook Business Page and update on a regular basis. Tie it into a Marketing Calendar. The only cost is your time.

So per capita, Ireland is in the top 15 countries worldwide for Facebook penetration.

Tips on how to produce a Webinar that works.

TV shows and Facebook and Twitter. Update as you watch.

The new True Blood Season 2 Blu-ray Disc has a social networking feature that fans of the HBO series can really sink their teeth into: automatic updates to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Making your video news more discoverable: best practices for news publishers. Equally applies to loads of other segments too.