Silence the spammers from your Twitter DM once and for all

If we remove the followers that are coming from an API the danger that comes from that is the loss of a follower that is a “True Follower”.  When I say “True Follower” what I mean is they are the humans that we want, not the computer generated ones. You see a lot of people have accidentally clicked on links and had their DM (Direct Mail) hijacked recently and now the API’s are sending out messages on their behalf without them knowing.

Therefore, we need to be careful about simply deleting and removing our faithful followers. Instead I say lets flood our updates on Twitter with this link to clean out your DM (Direct Mail) in case you’ve been spammed, hijacked, or hookwinked!  Thanks to a tip from MadKeet on Twitter we can follow this link to clean your twitter direct mail if you are concerned, and update your status from time to time or forward to anyone who’s sending weird messages to you:

How to Deal W/ Twitter DM Spam: http://j.mp/1gxEeT

If after a few days you’re still getting spammed from the follower, maybe you should unfollow them. That’s a decision you’ll have to make.

We can fight back, we just have to be smarter than the spammers and not allow them to make our followers go away and leave us followless!

Do random followers on Twitter just get you a bunch of junk?

Following on Twitter is so interesting isn’t it?  You get the random followers and then you get the followers you definitely know like your family and friends..But what’s up with these people who follow you who aren’t spammers but seem to have good information?  How did they find you? Because you are just a random person right? Well I will tell  you what I am doing and that might explain what they are doing.

I learned from Pat Flynn that increasing your followers is easy if you find a “Guru” and follow their followers. He talks about it on his YouTube page. What he says happens when you do this, is that, when you find a person who has the same interest as you who is the “GURU” with a lot of followers then you can go to their followers and follow all of them. Nine times out of ten these people will follow you back if they have an auto follow turned on. But what about the rest of us that do not believe in API’s and auto replies? How do we interest them enough to want to follow us back?  We’ve got to have something on our profile that entices that person to want to follow us.  I would personally like to think that my blog is enough to get a person to follow me.

But, Pat teaches one more unique trick that has changed the game. If you want to double your chances at getting us those followers faster, that is.  What you can do is go to the “Guru’s” Twitter page prior to following his group of followers by sending a message with a “@guru” maybe something as simple as hey how are you, or ask a question or even mention something that they have been talking about.  Then when the followers come to your page to see who you are, they will see that you know the “Guru” and they will see that you are a “good person” who is likely someone they want to follow.  Pat has the insight on this and truly has changed the way I seek out followers. Previously I was gaining about 10-30 a day, since I switched to Pat’s method 2 days ago, I increased my followers by literally hundreds. I was at 100 followers a week ago and now on November 14, 2009 I am at 1025.  Pretty cool right?  Now, the important thing to remember about me, is that my circle of the world is BROAD because I am in marketing.  If your circle is small, you might want to do this a little differently.  I don’t mind having a few junk followers here and there.  I know I can always go back in and clean it up later.  The point is to get the followers so that when I post up information about my site, as many people as possible can get the data.

Hope this clarifies why you don’t need to click on any of those spammy get followers fast sites.

TWITTER isn’t as confusing as you think

How I am using Twitter for business is to announce events, attempt to sell our products, and give general education on the industry that we work in.  So how do I do this?  Well, first what I do is come up with unique “Tweets”.  Most people on Twitter are very good at this. If you don’t know how then just go follow your favorite businesses, a few teenagers (kids are the best users in my opinion at using Twitter), and then copy their style until you come up with your own.

How I use Twitter for personal use is a little different.  For me, my whole page was intended to be personal, but the people who were following me suddenly were in the same industry that I work in.  When I noticed there was an opportunity for some networking and freelance work, I jumped on this and changed my design of my Twitter page. You can actually make your own design in any program you choose as long as you change it to a .jpg and upload it into Twitter’s design page from the settings and create a very professional looking page. If you’re not a designer, then simply hire someone or ask a friend (ahhheem – call me!) to design one for you.

So how does Twitter work?  Well, what happens when you go onto Twitter is you get “Followers” rather than “Friends”.  These followers in turn will expect you to “Follow” them. It’s the polite thing to do. You don’t have to, and certainly if your getting a bunch of spam followers like porn stars and junk asking you to buy this and that, you can click on the little icon to the right of their name and block them from ever seeing your page and following you again.

Here’s where it gets a little tricky – or maybe not so tricky, but requires some thought. Who do you want to follow and follow you? I am in Marketing so I want anyone who wants to ever do business and needs a “Marketer” I want those people to follow me. My “Circle of the world” is very broad and big.  However if your goal is only have people who are in the industry of “education” follow you, your going to have a harder process of weeding out the junk and quite frankly a harder time finding your followers. It’s not impossible though.  In a later blog post, I will tell you how was able to do just this for a company in a similar situation and now has a great following of people.  It’s not perfect, but the followers are going to their microsites (using a PURL or personalized URL) and converting their tweets into prospects. Hopefully those prospects can convert into sales very soon!

Your tweets should always talk about your business or product you are trying to sell and showing a photo of the product within the tweet or listing a site where they can learn more, or video is how you gain more visibility for your business. If you are using Twitter for personal use, I always thought of it as texting on my phone but much faster..maybe that’s why I prefer to use it for business.  I simply cannot keep up with my friends who type that fast, LOL!

I hope this brief explanation helps!

Facebook friendship access DENIED from Corporations?

Today we had an interesting topic on our agenda in our staff meeting.  It was regarding social networking sites and whether or not it was acceptable to befriend people in business as it relates to the particular company I work for.  They were afraid that employees having photo’s of themselves drinking and half naked might put our company in a bad “light.” The end result was “NO” it is not okay to be friends with co-workers or anyone that we do business with.  Oddly, many in the meeting were devastated. Not sure if it was because they don’t have a lot of friends on Facebook, or if they really like their co-workers – LOL!

Funny, if they read my blog regarding how to block out your Facebook Status and your Facebook photo album, perhaps they would have just forwarded the instructions and required everyone to do that. Oh well.  It’s probably for the best.

Really, it depends what your goal with Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc. is. I personally use Facebook as a way to connect with friends that I know very well and don’t normally see often. So, although I have a few co-workers as friends on Facebook, the vast majority are just good buddies that are from my school days. We share photo’s of our lives and our children.  A few of us haven’t quite grown up and yes, there may be an incriminating photo or two on my page.

As for Twitter, LinkedIn, and the many other social networking sites, I keep those all strictly business. For me the news was actually not good or bad news since I already had all of my co-workers and business associates blocked from seeing any status updates and uncomfortable photo’s of myself…Like the one where I almost…Nevermind. You too can do this with Facebooks great privacy settings. But the point is, if you have a page that you really don’t intend on doing business on it at all, then my suggestion is to not accept business associates and instead, refer them to your other social networking pages that you DO conduct business on. It will keep a lot of unwanted confusion down.

Hope this helps you keep all your friends, followers, and connections in tact!

Twitter and PURLS make sense

When I use Twitter and PURLS what I am doing is tracking the success of my call to action which is my tweet.  If someone goes further and fills a form out on my “microsite” then I can track that within the software as well.  The vendor that I use has built in the ability for me to follow through and track which pages each of you have clicked on within my microsites, so once a person clicks on my tweet, I can actually tell if they clicked within a microsite and what pages they clicked on.  Should they decide to fill out the form, I now have real data as to who the “Tweeter” is.

Twitter and PURLS make sense.

Another quick tip. When tweeting and posting links, I always post in 4’s for business.  What I mean is if I am on my business page then I will post up a tweet and word it 4 different ways with unique call to actions to get folks to click on the same microsite.  Yes, I said the same microsite. If you think about this – IT MAKES SENSE for a business.  Most business pages have roughly 1000 followers.  Those followers have 1000 followers and so on.  For them to even see your tweet, your gonna need to post it at the very LEAST four times.  HOWEVER, you don’t want to be obnoxious or you’ll lose people from following you. So use this strategy wisely.  I myself have unfollowed people who tweet 10 times in a row because it’s just stupid.

Now, what this is going to do is raise your chances of having a great response on that microsite, but now I call this a tweet campaign not a microsite with high response.  Because if you base it solely on the PURL or microsite itself, then its not fair, because remember, your tweeting in 4’s.

Hope this helps you and you get tweeting with some PURLS! If you need some advice on who can provide you with PURLS at an inexpensive price, I have used a vendor down in Florida that I love! They even provided my CMS system that they programmed. Love, love, love it! Email me if you want the deets!

Facebook Fan Pages for beginners

Several phone calls have come to me asking how do I set up a facebook page for my business?  Well you want to definitely have a facebook page but you should make a Facebook FAN page in my opinion and I will tell you why.

1. With a Facebook Fan page, you will be able to send out updates to all of your “Fan’s” rather than Friends via Notes and they show up in the News Feed automatically.  It’s more of a force fed stream. (It’s actually not annoying though. As long as you do not abuse sending too many notes)
2. You can create a landing page for your fan page which you cannot do with a friend page. A landing page will allow for you to have a special place for any NEW visitors to your fan page to STOP first.  So they will come to this landing page that is a special design and here you can have any offers.  So if your business is to sell say a book then perhaps on your landing page you might say “Buy the ABC Book today and get 5% off plus free shipping” and you can also list some of the other products you sell here as well and maybe a bio about who your company is.
3. The Facebook fan page allows you to create a pay per click button so that you show up on the left side of everyone’s page.  Yeah – you know those little ad’s you see from time to time that say “Become a fan of the Bob and Tim Show, Lisa is a fan and so are 4 more of your friends.”  Well you can only do this with a Facebook Fan page. It does cost money, but it’s pay as you go and VERY minimal, and you can target your audience so some would say it’s very worth the money.
4. You can add video’s and other cool functionality that you can force into the news feed that is a bit more difficult as a friend. The fan page is less intrusive in my opinion and allows for more customization of your Facebook page. You know how you can only do so much with your page as a friend? Well…now you’ll actually be able to customize more things like your tabs! It’s so cool!

Remember to link back to your website to ensure that your getting SEO (search engine optimization) and to have your website link back to your Facebook page.  You want to promote your page everywhere including in your signature on your email, on your business cards, brochures – you want to get as many fans as you can so that you can sell as much product as you can. It is all about the almighty dollar at the end of the day right? RIGHT!

So, what are you waiting for? Start your Facebook Fan page today and start connecting to fans! Or send me a message and I will help ya!

PURLS aren’t just for direct mail campaigns anymore

You can use a PURL (personalized URL) in anything these days. I use them in my email campaigns, my magazine ads and even in my tweets on twitter. I thought I would talk about the benefits of using them in a magazine ad over using a phone number today.

In the old days you might have used a 1-800 number on your magazine ad and that’s fine and dandy, but let me ask you this… “how’s that workin’ out for ya?” Not to be mean, but uh – I bet you my mortgage, I’m getting more response than you are…See, the reason why I am so positive that you can get faster response using a PURL is simple. If you use a 1-800 number, you are ahead of someone who is just putting an ad in a magazine. At least you’ve taken the initiative to put something so that the reader can contact you.

HOWEVER, what if you put a PURL in the ad in addition to that 800#?  Then, you would have REAL TIME results that you could track! You would know where in the “WORLD” that person was when they clicked on the link, what pages they visited while they were on your site, if you put a form on the site, then you can ask for more detailed information from the reader like their name, address, email address, etc – and NOW you have developed your database so you can market even better as well as you can potentially close a sale to this now VALIDATED customer!!

PURLS make sense! Also, using a PURL on a magazine ad will reduce the time that you have to wait on those analysis reports from your marketing people. Now you can just do a few clicks from your website and find out quickly how well the PURL campaign went.

Getting smart with your PURLs

It’s best for your PURL call to action to be more of a tease. I will give you an example of a piece that I mailed recently with the theme based on the NBC game show “Deal or No Deal.”

On the mailer which was a postcard, I used a picture of a briefcase that said “Please go to visit your PURL (Personalized URL) for a chance to win the contents of case No. 13” This is a good call to action one might think – but you can’t stop here. You’ve got to put even more. So next I say “When you get to your personalized URL you’ll see what’s inside case #13” This will create enough interest and a buzz to get the client to visit their PURL and find out what the heck is in case #13?

So what did I do next? Well once they arrived at the “Microsite” they saw the contents of the case with a very creative microsite I designed that had the music from deal or no deal along with the banker in the background and I even had the whole stage as my layout. But I didn’t stop there. That really wasn’t the important part – THIS IS, so pay attention please! I only sent these mailers to people in my list that I knew were interested in what was in the case. The contents of the case was a hunting trip in the Texas area. The list went to people that lived in Texas and that were avid hunters. We also made sure that they were clients that were in the 80% range of making a purchase of the capital equipment that we were attempting to sell. So on the microsite there was an offer that read “Joe, please come to our office for an open house and purchase a particular machine at a very attractive price and also register for the contents of the case by filling out the form on the microsite.” The personalization doesn’t stop with the mailer – it continues on the microsite all the way down to the particular piece of equipment that we already know they are interested in. Whether it’s a widget “A” “B” or “C” we can switch out the widget with variable printing an variable data on the microsite as well.

The only way to win the contents of the case is to actually show up at the office and attend the open house. Once they come to the open house, our goal is to sell them the high dollar capital piece of equipment.

Tracking back to the PURL is simple, as soon as a client clicks on their PURL an alert is sent to both the salesperson and the sales assistant so that the sales person can immediately contact the client and make communication to get them more interested in the product. My research has shown that if you contact a client while they are on your website within the first 5 minutes, you have an 80% chance of having good communication. However, if you wait 20 minutes those chances go down to 5%.

So what do we do with all the data? Well, its very cool actually, we can learn how often they visit the site, whether they forward the site on to someone else, or if they move from page to page if we’ve built a microsite that has multiple pages. So we can tell their interests very easily. PURLS can help you determine in a short matter of time what your clients needs and wants are without being invasive.

Facebook pesky status updates that you dont want to see

I had a friend ask me today how to get rid of the pesky constant updates of friends on facebook that she really didn’t want to see. She said she didn’t want to be rude and just delete the friend. Was there any alternative?

Yes! There is! Facebook is one of the few social networks that has all sorts of privacy settings for you.  Here are a few things you can try:

1. When you see a friend who constantly is updating their status and you just don’t want to see it any longer, you can click over to the right hand side of their status in the news feed and a button will appear that says “HIDE”. If you click this, you will not see their status updates any longer. Don’t worry, if you want it back you can go to your settings at the bottom of the news feed under “Edit” and change it back.
2. You can also block out people from your phone by unsubscribing from their “SMS updates” if you have accidentally chosen that as an option. Sometimes you might do this when you first accept a friend and then all of the sudden you are getting frequent vibration alerts on your cell phone from a friend telling you they just took out the trash…um…that’s fine and dandy, but I have a real job and don’t need all the details of your life!
3. If you no longer want the friend to see your updates I would refer you to my earlier post Privacy on Facebook..the right way.

Hope this helps you to keep your current facebook friends because lets face it…nobody wants to be “deleted”! LOL!

PURL FAQ’s

So, a little more information about PURL’s today.  When talking about PURL’s one might say “I want to know why I would want to use a PURL in a marketing campaign.” The answer to that question is simple.

1. If you want to target an audience that is defined such as by age, gender, or any list for that matter then this would help you.
2. PURL’s will increase your response rate by double in most cases. The reason is that you have real time responses and there is no error. With PURL’s there are “Microsites” that are developed based off of your own website that you can create or your design team can develop. Once this is done, you have the ability to completely control the responses that are coming in. An example of this would be my Twitter PURL’s. What I do is create “Microsites” that have a unique PURL for every tweet that I create. Next, I create unique tweets that engage the audience to click on the link within Twitter. Once people click on the Tweet I can immediately go into my software for my Microsite CMS system and watch everyone clicking on the microsite to see what pages within the microsite have been hit.  I always place a form on every “Microsite” to entice people to a call to action so that more is done.
3. When talking about Direct Mail the best reason for using a PURL is simple. With a PURL now your customers have the ability to feel more connected with you as being PERSONALIZED.  The PURL reads as www.yourwebsite.com/customername so the customer is immediately drawn to the mailer because they think “hmmm how did my name get it’s own website?” They go to the website and then they see a website that has their own name on it again that says “Hi Tom (or whatever the customer’s name is), We’ve got this special widget for you today at a steal of a price. If you buy today it’s marked down to $10 instead of $50.  Immediately the customer thinks – “Wow, they really know me..I need this!” 

If you have a good list managment process, and have been keeping track of your customers, then you will know exactly what your customer needs are and will have sent them the exact widget they wanted. You can purchase a good list from many different sources these days for next to nothing. I can talk more about that later. But again, I am just giving you little bits and pieces for now to wet your appetite with PURL’s!  Use them often, use them wisely!