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Thinking about taking your brand social? There are a lot of benefits to be gained, but if you make any of these common mistakes, your social media marketing efforts could do more harm than good.
Here are 7 social media screw ups to avoid.

1. Not interacting with others — Engagement is essential for social media success. You have to interact with others if you want to make a splash with social media marketing. That means taking the time to respond when people talk to you, being insightful in your comments, and trying to build relationships with your audience.

2. Not being authentic — Social media demands that you be more authentic and transparent. It’s about connecting with customers on a more personal level, so that you aren’t just some big, faceless corporation to them. That’s one of the reasons I’m against ghost tweeting. Having a social media “professional” Tweet under your company’s name is like lying to everyone.

3. Treating social media like a traditional advertisement — Social media is a conversation. Conversations require both people talk. That means you can just start blasting one-way advertisements at everyone. You have to tone it down several notches and instead focus on adding value to the conversation.

4. Being unable to handle criticism — Whether you’re starting a blog or getting on Twitter, you’re going to run into people who have negative things to say about you and your company. It’s one of the great things about social media. It puts everyone on a level playing field. Consumers get to say what they want. If you don’t have thick skin, this can be a problem. You’ll respond unprofessionally, and just make everything worse than it already is.

5. Diving in without getting a feel for the field — The “bull in the china shop” approach never works with social media. You can’t just sign up for a new community (whether it’s Twitter, Digg, or whatever else), and immediately expect to be a top influencers. Every community works differently, and each has its own set of unwritten rules. That’s why you have to spend time studying the network you’re going to join before you start taking part in the conversation.

6. Careening toward social media burnout — Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. An exec comes into the office, announcing he wants to socialize the brand. He signs up on Twitter, Tweets at a feverish pace for a couple of weeks, gets frustrated with a lack of progress/results, and quits, deeming social media to be nothing more than a fad. To be successful, you need to really do your homework, and you need to stay committed to it for the long haul.

7. Disappearing. Reappearing. Disappearing again — Imagine you started dating someone, but you only got to see them in brief spurts every few days and sometimes every few weeks. It’d be pretty hard to build a relationship, don’t you think? The same concept applies to social media marketing. You can’t show up, then disappear for a stretch of time, and show up again, expecting people to pay attention to you.

What are some other social media marketing mistakes you’ve seen? Share your experiences by leaving a comment.

Related Content

• How to Stop Wasting Time and Start Being Successful with Social Media
• 70 Do Follow Social Media Sites
• 11 Reasons You Can’t Ignore Social Media in 2009
• 10 Foolproof Steps to Writing Hot Social Media Content

Every day, tens of thousands of new users sign up for a Twitter account. If you’re new to Twitter, you want to make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot, looking like a complete Twitter Noob. That’s why you need to avoid these 7 mistakes.

1. You only update once a week—Building a successful Twitter presence requires consistently providing quality content to your followers. Remember, it’s called “social media.” It’s all about establishing solid relationships. You can’t expect to build relationships or credibility by Tweeting rarely.

2. Every Tweet is a pitch for your company—Just because you’re using Twitter to further your business doesn’t mean every Tweet should be an advertisement for your company. Self-promotional Tweets add no value to your followers and it’s completely the opposite of the concept of social networking.

3. You don’t have an avatar—Seriously, nothing screams “Noob!” like the default brown Twitter avatar.

4. Every Tweet says “Please RT”—Asking for a ReTweet on every post completely negates the purpose behind “Please RT.” Only ask for RTs when it’s for something truly important. Otherwise, people will begin to completely ignore your requests and eventually you.

5. You don’t interact with anybody—I’ve already said it a couple of times in this post, but I’ll say it again: It’s called “social networking.” Sending out a bunch of one way Tweets will get you nowhere fast. You need to spend time networking with others, interacting with your followers, and laying the groundwork for useful relationships.

6. Your bio is non-descriptive—Many times, the bio in someone’s profile is what convinces me if I should follow them or not. So, make sure your bio describes who you are and what you do. Include relevant keywords that your target audience would look for.

7. Auto responding to new followers—Sending out a canned auto reply every time someone new follows you is impersonal and a little spammy (especially if your auto response is a pitch for your products and services). If you don’t have the time to personally send a short DM or @ Tweet to your new followers, then instead focus on getting to know them over time.

What other mistakes to Twitter noobs make? Add your favorites in the comments.

Related Posts:-

How to Stop Wasting Time and Start Being Successful with Social Media

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How to Build Strong Relationships on Twitter

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100 Web Designers to follow on Twitter

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times: Social media is a waste of time. There’s no way to measure your results. Plus, it’s just a fad. This is the rallying cry of social media skeptics in the business community. And you know what? I agree with them…to an extent.

Let me explain.

Social media is a waste of time if you blindly jump into it without knowing what you’re doing. And you can’t measure results if you don’t create a strategy with goals for tracking your progress. And because you’re doing it all wrong, you will get tired of it, making it a passing fad for you.

So, this all leads to the question: How do you do social media right? It all starts with building a social media plan with goals and a strategy for reaching them.

Step #1—Set your goals

You know why most businesses give up on social media? Because they don’t really know what they want out of it. And since they don’t know what they want to achieve, their social media campaign isn’t moving toward anything.

Setting goals is essential to being successful with social media. Realistic social media goals include:

• Improving customer service

• Building brand awareness

• Increasing website traffic

• Creating more referrals for your business

• Earning more backlinks

• Getting to know your target audience better

• Soliciting new ideas from your target audience

You could add a dozen more items to this list, but the point is to set a goal before you do anything else.

Step #2—Do some research

Before you start Tweeting away, hold your horses for a minute. The next thing you need to do is some research to figure out which social media outlets will be most effective for reaching your goals. This means you need to determine which social networks your target audience uses, how other companies have used social media successfully, which social networks are a waste of time for your niche, how long it will take to start seeing results, and how you’re going to track your progress.

You should also spend time gathering as much information as you can about how to leverage social media for business success. Learn about social media etiquette, mistakes to avoid, and the ins and outs of the various social networks you plan to use.

Step #3—Create an action plan

All right: You have your goals, and you’ve done your research. It’s time to draft a plan for making those goals a reality.

• Schedule time for social media—This haphazard approach of using social media for your business will never cut it. You can’t send a few Tweets here, forget about it for a week, log on and send out some more Tweets, write a blog post, disappear for another week, and repeat. Like anything else in your business, you need to schedule time each day for putting your social media campaign to work. Not only will scheduling time make sure you’re consistently using social media, but it will also reduce the amount of time you waste as you’ll stay focused on the task knowing you have just a certain amount of time allotted for it.

• Build your network—It’s called “social media” for a reason. You need to be social, and you need to build relationships. A powerful network is crucial to achieving your social media goals. For example, if your goal is to solicit feedback from your target audience, they’re much likelier to provide this feedback if you have a relationship with them and they know who you are.

• Stay consistent—Using social media isn’t going to propel your business to the next level overnight. Social media success requires a long-term commitment to cultivating relationships and gathering the right information. Don’t get frustrated if no one seems to care about you after the first week or 2; it takes time.

• Track your progress—This is the most important part of your social media plan. Depending on what your goals are, you need to find a way to track them. For example, if your goal is to build more inbound links to your website, you need to constantly track how many links are pointing at your website from the time you started your social media campaign until now. If after a few months you see no increase in your backlinks, you need to move onto the next step:

• Adjust plan as necessary—Are you not progressing toward your goals the way you hoped you would? That’s okay. Instead of giving up, take a step back and figure out what adjustments you can make to kick start your progress.

Are you using social media for your business? What are your keys to social media success?

Related Posts:-

70 Do Follow Social Media Sites

11 Reasons You Can’t Ignore Social Media in 2009

How to Build Strong Relationships on Twitter

10 Foolproof Steps to Writing Hot Social Media Content

Don’t Believe these 10 Social Media Myths

The 11 Rules of Social Media Etiquette

A staple of successful internet marketing is a quality link building campaign.  There are many resources on the web on link building and I will not bother going into those details here.

As social media has grown and evolved over the past few years, it has become a new avenue for marketers and webmasters to execute link building campaigns.

This blog post is an attempt to list the social media sites that allow “do follow” links; which should have the potential to contribute to the search rank of the page being linked.

Contribute To This List
I am sure this list is far from being thorough and accurate.  The landscape of the social web will always be changing.  So, I invite everyone to leave comments recommending any “Social Media” websites that I have left off the list.  Some sites will be removed from time to time as well, as suggested by the comments.  Page Rank of the sites on the list will fluctuate over time.  They are meant to be a guide.

Guidelines for adding to the list

• Must be a social media site.
• Must allow for user submitted links that do not have the “no follow” tag on the link.
• Make suggestions as comments.

Guidelines for site removal from the list

• Must provide proof that “do follow” user submitted links do not exist on the site.
• Must prove that the site should not be considered a social media site.
• Make suggestions as comments.

Post by Eric Brantner

So, do you still think social media is a fad that we’ll all look back on and laugh at in the future? You can keep thinking that, but you’ll be stuck on the sidelines while social media continues to grow in 2009. In fact, let me give you 11 reasons you won’t be able to ignore social media this year.

1. Everyone is Using it- Okay, so it’s a bit of a stretch to say “everyone” is using social media, but the truth is there are millions of social media users. According to one study, over 60 million Americans have read a blog. Worldwide, that number is closer to 350 million. When my parents send me YouTube links, I know that almost everyone is involved with social media now.

2. Social Media is Gaining Trust- One of the knocks on social media as a source of information used to be that it wasn’t trustworthy. Today, social media is one of the top sources of news and important updates. People are starting to gain trust in it, and as a result, it’s still growing.

3. It’s Still Growing- The bottom line is new people are becoming social media users every day. According to newly released statistics, Facebook is now growing by about 600,000 users each day. Blog reading has grown by over 66% in the last year. In other words, social media is still growing, and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

4. Our President Uses it- Soon to be President Obama has gotten the most out of social media. His campaign was highly active on Twitter, and now he uses YouTube to deliver his weekly address. In fact, his communication strategy has recently been dubbed “Obama 2.0.” President Obama has big plans to continue using the web as an important means of communicating with the American public.

5. When One Social Network Falls, Another Rises- Whenever a social network starts to decline in popularity (see MySpace,) detractors are quick to say that social media really is a fad. What they fail to realize is that the demise of one social network doesn’t spell the demise of social media. While MySpace was waning in popularity, sites like Twitter were exploding onto the scene. So, don’t be fooled by the downturn of a single social network. Others are stronger than ever before.

6. It’s Fast- In this increasingly digital society, speed is of the essence. We want the latest information, and we want it now. That’s another reason social media is so popular. Bloggers routinely break the latest stories, and the instant interactivity makes social media a hit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve followed conference coverage on blogs, Twitter, and other sources.

7. Cost Efficient for Companies- With the economy continuing to spiral out of control, companies are looking for new, cost-efficient ways to communicate with their target audience. Social media is fast becoming a priority for many of them. It’s one of the cheapest, fastest, and most effective ways to tap into the consumer pulse. Rest assured, the number of companies using social media will only rise in 2009.

8. It’s Passionate- One of the main reasons social media is knocking newspapers out of business is the passion behind it. With social media, people have leeway to inject their personality into the mix, and things are a bit more informal. As a result, this connects better with readers than stiff, impersonal content. Love them or hate them, social media users are as passionate as they come. Just hang out on Digg for a few minutes reading comments if you don’t believe me.

9. It’s Free- Everyone loves anything that’s free.

10. Social Media is Versatile- The social media landscape is more versatile than ever before. There are social networks for virtually every niche imaginable. Whether you’re looking to talk about video games or to connect with young singles, there are social networks out there for you. This versatility means that everyone has a place in the social media realm.

11. The Internet is Social- At the end of the day, this is the biggest reason you can’t ignore social media in 2009. The Internet is an inherently social medium. That won’t change. People will always want to engage with one another online, and social media will be there in one form or another to accommodate this need.

Are you ready to pay attention to social media in 2009? Which reasons would you add to this list? Tell me about them in the replies!