What’s your MVSN (most valuable social network)?

With a lot of active participation, the general conclusion was: depends what you want to get out of it.  Here’s a summary of each social network’s valuable points:

Twitter

Biggest, easiest, fastest reach, can build relationships and a community the most easily, especially for B2B. @skjask, @myparnasa, @jewnet

Nicest people, willingness to help others, quick answers to all sort of questions. @skjask, @myparnasa, @ilenerosenblum, @hadassah_levy

Driving traffic to a content website. @hadassah_levy

Facebook

Photo sharing – they can be discovered and “liked” months after you posted them and go around again. @RealJStreets

Conversion for B2C businesses, especially those that provide a “fun” product or service people will want to tell their friends about. It’s an extension of word of mouth.  @JewishSpeeches

LinkedIn

Business leads for B2B. Make yourself useful on LinkedIn groups, then post your relevant content there, keep posting it in different groups, and you can get sustained traffic. @myparnasa, @ilenerosenblum

Google+

Tech news. @ilenerosenblum

Quora

Help getting answers. @ilenerosenblum

We look forward to seeing you in two weeks for the next #msmktg chat, on Monday Nov 28th.  We’re considering changing the time to accommodate more people, so if you have a time preference (sometime in between 9AM to 1PM GMT+2, tweet to @DebiZSEO and let me know.  Follow us also to get the time and topic updates!

Most Valuable Social Network – #msmktg Nov 14 is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Thanks to all who participated in the first #msmktgchat – Women’s Internet Marketing Twitter Chat!  We heard some great tips about how to significantly increase your site’s traffic from all the women who shared.

For those of you who weren’t able to make it, or even those of you who were but didn’t take notes, I’ve written up the practical takeaways, in the order they were given.  There were other questions, answers and ideas that happened around them at the chat, but I’ve pared it down to the minimum. If you want to add any tips, please do so in the comments below!

1. Blogging and Google PPC (pay-per-click) ads. Starting a PPC if doesn’t exist brings new traffic.  - from @ilenerosenblum

2. How-to blog posts (anything where you’re explaining how to do something that many people want to know how to do – especially if they’re annoyed when they can’t do it). They get me organic Google traffic, plus I’ll search for participatory sites where the topic of the article was asked about, by searching the topic in Google and seeing if any are blogs or forums or Q&A sites that are talking about that topic. I add a comment/answer/post saying how the following link is a detailed explanation of how to [topic].

Bonus tip: after searching, click the “More” link in the Google sidebar where different categories of results are listed and click “Discussions” or “Blogs” to narrow it down. – from @debizseo

3. Taking the time to build a network on Twitter of people who will click on your links and share them too (up to 350 Twitter visitors to a single post!). Good way to find people in your niche who are likely to share: use Twitter search. – from @hadassah_levy

4. Get a Facebook maven to guest post on your site and then let them send their entire network to read their post. This works AWESOME! – from @myparnasa

5. Setting up pages in wordpress with keywords. Holidays always get traffic. – from @mominisrael

Stay tuned for the date of the next #msmktgchat. It will be at some point “after the chagim” (that’s Israel-speak for “after the Jewish holiday season”). Once we restart, we’ll be chatting every other Monday.  For details (and potentially a new, shorter hashtag), make sure to follow chat hosts @myparnasa and @debizseo, if you don’t already.

Looking forward to seeing you! (Well, “looking forward to seeing your avatar” might be more accurate.  ;)

Share your own site traffic increasing tips with all of us in the comments below!

How to Significantly Increase Your Site Traffic – #msmktgchat Sept 19 is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

What’s a Twitter Chat?

Let’s answer the last one first. A Twitter chat is when people on Twitter agree that they will all be on Twitter at a certain time and talk about a certain topic.  The way that you keep track of the conversation among all the other tweets on your flowing tweetstream is that after every post in the chat you add a hashtag unique to that chat (e.g. #ourchat).

That way you can at least track the conversation by doing a search for that hashtag in Twitter search or in a client like Hootsuite, and at most you can use different programs to track the hashtag for you, view the chat, create a transcript of the chat so people who missed it can read it after, and give you user stats about chat participation.

So you want to know the details now?

First a word of background: after going through a list of hundreds of Twitter chats, and narrowing them down to all the internet marketing related ones, I noticed that they were basically geared towards Eastern standard time.  Which meant that they were at very inconvenient times for me over here (either when I’m giving my daughter supper and putting her to sleep, or at 3 in the morning).

So my options were either: get up at 3 in the morning, or – start our own Twitter chat.  I – not surprisingly – opted for the latter. And I figured it would probably help a lot of people who don’t want to get up at 3 in the morning.

Okay – now the details:

Topic: Professional women talk about internet marketing: SEO, social media and any other internet marketing strategies. Share with and learn from internet marketing specialists and other business owners. Each chat will be focused around a particular topic and questions that will be announced in advance.

Hashtag: #msmktgchat (as in: Ms. Marketing Chat)

Date and Time: Mondays at 11AM-noon GMT+3 (that’s currently, using daylight savings time; during the winter it’ll be GMT+2)

To translate: that’s the time zone of Israel and Eastern European Time; it’s 2 hours ahead of the UK.

We’ll be starting next Monday, September 19th, and we’ll decide then at what frequency the chat will be – weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

Moderators: Aviva Blumstein (that would be me) @DebiZSEO and Naomi Elbinger – @myparnasa.

This Monday’s topic: What’s the one thing you’ve done that’s improved traffic to your site?  This can be either a short term traffic improvement or a long-term traffic improvements. If you have something to say, fantastic.  We’d love to hear.  If not, come listen and learn from other women professionals like you.

Looking forward to seeing you!

(If you haven’t yet subscribed to our blog, you might want to now to make sure you get the chat topic and questions in advance.)

Announcing New Women’s Internet Marketing Twitter Chat! is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

So how do you do it? The first thing you need to do is edit your gmail signature.

On the first settings tab that appears (General), scroll down until you find the “Signature” row:

If you already have a signature, great.  If not, add your name, phone number – whatever else you would like to show up on the bottom of every email you send. Now you want to add your facebook and twitter icons. Click the “Add Image” icon on the edit bar.

You’ll get this pop-up box:

There are a few options for image hosting – if you have a website, you could upload your image to your image gallery, and use that URL.  If not, you could upload your image to a photo-sharing site like Picasa or Flickr and use the image’s URL from there. The simplest option – if you don’t have a custom icon designed and you’re going to be finding one elsewhere on the web – is simply to use the URL of the image on that site.  Let’s take a look at how that works:

One of the sites I found recently for icons – and has really nice stuff, organized well – is Iconfinder. Their homepage is basically their logo and a search bar to search for the kind of icon you want.

You’ll get a whole page full of facebook icons. Pick one you liked.  I liked this one, designed by Jason LaRose:

The top two links on the left (PNG and ICO) are the download links for the icon.  But before you press any of those, click the INFO link on the top right to get a drop down menu.  The important information there is the License (because you don’t want a license that requires giving attribution if you’re putting it in an email signature) and if the icon belongs to an Icon set.

You found a good one! Right-click on the image. In the menu that results, look for “Copy Image URL” (Chrome) or “Copy Image Location” (Firefox).

Now go back to that Add an Image box you got when you clicked on the image icon in your signature.

Ta-da! It should now be in your signature box.  But wait – we’re not done yet. You have a nice image – but it won’t take your reader who clicks on it anywhere.  Let’s add the link to your facebook icon. Click on the image to select it.

You’ll get the following pop-up box:

A word of caution: make sure the page is the URL of your actual Facebook page – as opposed to copying your “Home” page, because when you look at it you see your wall so you assume that URL is the URL that everyone should use.  If you use that as your link, anyone who clicks on your icon will go to their own Home page – if they’re logged in, and the Facebook main page, if they’re logged out.  Where is your real page URL?  Use the search box at the top of Facebook to search for your page or profile name, and go to that page. That’s it.

And that’s it! You’ve done it!  Now add any other social media icon links you want – Twitter, LinkedIn – wherever you want your email recipients to connect to you.

Don’t forget to click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the Gmail email settings page when you’re done. Send yourself a test email to make sure all the links work – and now email everyone you know to show them your beautiful signature.

Well, maybe you want to hold off on that.  But if you really want to show it off – and you can find my email address in the screenshots above – you can email me.

How Do I Add Facebook and Twitter Icon Links to My Gmail Signature? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

The world population now stands at approximately 7 billion.  That’s about 5 tweets per person in the entire world per day.  Even if a good part of that figure is made up of automatic tweets from bots, that still leaves a lot of real tweets.

How can you find anything in that mess? More specifically, how can you find the conversations that are relevant to your business niche so that you can take part in them?

Twitter’s search function is very helpful, especially the Advanced Search. You can choose words to include, words to exclude, place, language, and more. You can even specify attitude – positive or negative sentiment, or asking a question.  If you sell baby toys, for example, you might want to know whenever someone asks a question with the words “baby” and “toy” in it.  Then you can answer him or her with your helpful advice, develop your reputation, make connections and hopefully down the line that will lead to sales.

But what if you go offline and you can’t monitor your stream of potential baby toys questions? You could just open it up when you get back on and scroll down.  One option.  Here’s another:

Twilert is a tool that sends Twitter alerts for these kind of search queries to your email.  You can set a simple alert or a more advanced one:

The Twilert advanced search options give most of the same options that there are in the Twitter Search, and then sends the whole list of all the tweets that match (since your last alert, it seems, although currently all my alerts are set to “every day”, so I’m not sure how many tweets they send if your alert goes only once a week) to your email.  You can scroll down and click on the tweets you’re interested in responding to.

Here’s one of my alerts:

It’s for “seo” with a question mark in it (that’s how they find “questions”).  I think I actually might stop this one, because almost everyone who tweets is advertising their own SEO products and knowledge, and not actually asking questions about SEO.  You’ll see as you get the results of your Twilerts how you should tweak them to be giving you the tweets which are really beneficial for you.

Happy tweeting!

**Special thanks to Miriam Schwab of Illuminea for introducing me to the tools in this post!

How Do I Find Out When Someone is Tweeting About a Topic I’m Interested In? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

So take a look at Social Butterflies and Other Creatures: Your Social Media Guide!

Just Out: New Social Media Guide! is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

So we want to make it easy.  Adding Facebook and Twitter Share buttons (and LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.) that are obvious, simple to use and even tell you how many times the post has been shared – is the solution.

But how do you add them easily and quickly? After all, we are living in the digital age, other known as…

The following few paragraphs are the story of how I found the information I’m about to share with you on adding easy Facebook and Twitter share buttons, and it contains a bonus  ”How Do I SEO” tip hidden inside: if I see something I like on another site, how do I get it on my site? If you’re extremely impatie… efficient with your time, feel free to scroll down directly to the picture of the man pumping his hand in victory below.

About two months ago, I tried to put this type of Share buttons on our blog.  I spent a few hours trying to work with the Tweetmeme buttons and place it on our blog posts, but I couldn’t get them to format on the site the way I wanted (apparently I needed more advanced web developer skills than I have – although that’s not saying a lot), so I put it on the back burner until I could ask someone with more programming experience.

Today I was inspired to try again by a blog post by Naomi Elbinger about how to get more readers for your blog posts. She recommended having the buttons so encourage your readers to share it… and thus draw more readers. I checked out what kind of share buttons Naomi had, and they looked neat and nicely formatted.  Taking a look at the code for her blog post (right-click on the page and press “view page source”), I searched for “twitter” and pressed “next” in the find box until I got to what looked like code for a Twitter share button. I saw that the buttons came from a plugin called “Really Simple Share.”

(Yes, I know it’s cut off – but if I made it smaller you wouldn’t be able to read it.)

I put “really simple share twitter” into Google and one of the first results was a WordPress plugin page for a plugin called “Really Simple Share.” Yay – it’s a WordPress plugin and our site is built on WordPress – fantastic!

Go to your WordPress site admin dashboard.

You will get this screen:

Then:

Then:

You will get a screen telling you that the plugin has been installed.  Click the “Activate Now” link.

Okay, that’s it, you’re done.  Right?

Well, kind of.  But unless your site is a series of blog posts, you could end up with some rather ugly things like this:

Oops.  How do we get those off – and fast, before someone *sees* that page?  (Yes, that went through my head.)

Follow me to part two! Don’t worry – it’s not hard, and we’re almost done.

Click again on “Plugins” on the side menu to get to the list of all the plugins on your site.  Scroll down until you find “Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons.”  (Hint – the plugins are in alphabetical order.)

You will get the following settings screen:

Which Share Buttons:

I picked Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – but you pick whatever works for you.

What Pages to Show the Buttons On:

I put it just on our blog “single posts”, but at some point I might decide to put it on our pages also.  (just not the homepage – definitely not the homepage…) Interesting point – the count seems to work retroactively, meaning it counts actual shares and not just those via the share button.  This comes from the fact that when I had just put the buttons on, some appeared with numbers on.

Position of Buttons:

You might pick below if you think having the share immediately visible when the reader finished reading the post would encourage sharing, and you might pick above if you usually have a large number of shares and you want to give the visitor the impression that your post/page is really popular, to encourage them to read on.  And you might pick both if you want both benefits.

There are a few other options about the appearance and size of the Facebook and Twitter button, but those are pretty self-explanatory, and the default options work pretty well.

[For anyone who wants more technical details about the plugin, this is the WordPress Plugin Page for Really Simple Share.]

That’s it. You’re done. Really. Go and enjoy your new share buttons. If you want to see how they look, take a peek below. And you can always try ours out, to make sure they work.  :)

For more practical SEO and social media tips, get new blog posts delivered directly to your email or in the RSS reader of your choice.

How Do I Add Facebook and Twitter Share Buttons to My Site on WordPress? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

One creative Twitterer, however, saw an opportunity.  Starting two days ago, @bronxzooscobra has been tweeting updates about his escapades in New York City.

Note his profile “location”.

Some of our favorite tweets:

BronxZoosCobra now has 126,045 followers and counting, and has done email interviews with Time and The New York Times.

Social Media takeaways:

• Act quickly and be creative. Use what everyone’s talking about, but put a unique twist on it, and people will jump to follow.
• People need to laugh, to relax.  The breath of fresh air that BronxZoosCobra provided was mentioned by a few people who commented on the NY Times article.
• Do it well and don’t overdo.  BronxZoosCobra doesn’t inundate the world with tweets.  One every so often – and they’re all thought out and clever.

This social media stunt has been taken, but follow in the Cobra’s path and see where you can apply his lesssssons…

@bronxzooscobra – Lessssons in Successful Social Media is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

If you can write a blog post where you speak highly of the products or services of a well-known brand with a Facebook presence, there’ s the chance that you could get the brand to promote your post to all of its followers.  Let’s take a look:

Our example is Simplehuman, a company which makes house supplies – garbage cans, laundry baskets, dishracks, etc.  They have a Facebook following of 2920 people (as of today).

On February 22, one of their fans wrote this on their wall:

On February 23, Simplehuman reposted the link:

I don’t know how many Facebook friends Elka Karl has (most of her profile info is not available to just anyone on Facebook), but my guess is that it’s less than 2920. Even if it’s not, it’s certainly not the same 2920 people that are fans of Simplehuman. When Simplehuman reposted about Elka’s blog post, she got much wider exposure for that blog post.

What we can learn from Elka: if there’s a company whose products or services you like and they have a presence on Facebook, write a blog post about it and then post it on their wall.  If they like it, they may repost it. It’s good publicity for them, and it’s good blog exposure for you.  Everyone wins!

Any other good – or outlandish – blog exposure tips out there?

Edit: One of the numbers (of Simplehuman fans) read 2909 instead of 2920. That was actually because they gained 11 fans from yesterday when we started writing the post to today when we finished and when we changed the numbers we missed one.  May we all have such fan growth…

Getting Exposure for Your Blog on Facebook is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Tweeting and treating from @kraftmacncheese did resume yesterday from around 9AM to 4PM Pacific time, and has since been silent. Tweets continue to mention “mac and cheese” in hopes of winning those five free boxes of Mac and Cheese, and no one seems to be too disturbed that there are long periods of off-time.

The whole story with bovine growth hormone doesn’t appear to have affected the campaign too badly – people are still tweeting away in order to win their free boxes, and the Twazzup stats for “mac and cheese” show about 45 tweets per hour as of this writing, whereas the stats for “kraft bovine” show only 9 tweets per hour.

So my conclusions are a little different than yesterday’s: although I would still recommend anyone running a big social media campaign to have 24 hour support, or at the very least to announce when the promotion is ending (even just for the night), it seems that especially if people like the brand, your campaign can still be successful even if it doesn’t have 24 hour support or communication.

Although the definition of successful really depends on what Kraft intended to get out of it, and that’s anyone’s guess. More people buying Mac and Cheese after their 5 box supply runs out? Positive feelings about Kraft overall? More interest in Kraft’s social media presence?

Keep an eye on the campaign to learn from Kraft about what to do and what not to do for social media success.  If there’s anything relevant and practical, we’ll keep you updated!

Kraft Mac and Cheese Twitter Campaign Update is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.