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The Nine Best Social Media Influencers to Follow on Twitter

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If you want to learn more about the social media industry, follow these top social media influencers on Twitter. Whether you are a social media marketing specialist or just interested in the industry, these experts provide valuable links and resources that you may not find elsewhere.

  1. iJustine: Justine Ezarik is an Apple queen and does an amazing job at all things social media. She maintains an active presence on so many social media sites, it’s hard to believe how she does it. She is mainly known for her YouTube videos, but this girl is EVERYWHERE!
  2. Scott Monty: Scott Monty is the head of social media for Ford Motor Company. What may seem like an overwhelming responsibility to some has been a platform of success for Scott, who often speaks at social media conferences and explains how to use Ford’s strategies in other industries.
  3. Adam Ostrow: Adam is the Senior Vice President of Content and Executive Editor of Mashable.com, the extremely popular social media and internet news blog. He shares a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like working for Mashable while also re-tweeting great content and links.
  4. Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a celebrated social media consultant and author. His book, the NOW Revolution continues to be a hot seller and he also writes great content at http://www.convinceandconvert.com.
  5. Sarah Evans: Sarah is a great speaker and focuses on social media, public relations, and blogging. She does a great job with answering others’ questions and helping people when they need it. She also has a great perspective on industry trends.
  6. Mari Smith: Mari is amazing at Facebook and Twitter marketing. She regularly produces video tutorials and blog posts on MariSmith.com that makes new concepts and marketing techniques easy to understand and implement.
  7. Michael A. Stelzner: Michael founded SocialMediaExaminer.com, which is an amazing wealth of social media marketing information. Each article is heavily researched and contains great information.
  8. Shelly Kramer: Shelly is part of V3 Integrated Marketing, which is based out of Kansas City, Missouri. V3 does a great job of both promoting the social media industry in Kansas City and in general.
  9. Jeff Bullas: Jeff is a consultant and speaker specializing in social media, internet marketing, blogging, and content marketing.  He blogs at http://www.jeffbullas.com, which gets over 100,000 hits a month.

These are just some of the social media influencers who would be beneficial to follow on Twitter.

Who else do you think would be beneficial social media-wise to follow on Twitter?

How Social Media Involvement Can Help Your Company’s SEO Efforts

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Both Bing and Google are now using social media activity to help shape and determine search engine results pages (SERPs). This is based off the notion that a user will be more interested in seeing content that their friends and others in their social network have already shared or read versus content that hasn’t been accessed by anyone in their circle.

Because of this, companies need to get more proactive on a positive, community-driven social media strategy that can help drive engagement and promote user activity via social media.

[Read more…] about How Social Media Involvement Can Help Your Company’s SEO Efforts

The Best Free iPhone Applications for Social Media Marketing

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More and more consultants and professionals in the internet and social media marketing realm are using their smartphones (especially the Apple iPhone) to stay connected and maintain their online presence. There are several social media marketing applications available for the iPhone for free that can allow a social media marketing consultant or professional to stay connected and updated on the go.

Popular Social Media Applications

Twitter: Twitter allows the user to add multiple accounts and switch between them.  You cannot post on two accounts at one time. However, the interface is easy to use and loads quickly.

Facebook: The newest Facebook update allows users to write wall posts and publish photos onto the pages they are administrator of, but they cannot delete posts or comments.

LinkedIn: However, the LinkedIn application only allows for one account to be logged in at a time. The LinkedIn application is good for reading posts by other users, accepting requests, and sending InMail. Users cannot edit groups or company profiles.

Blogging Applications

WordPress: The iPhone WordPress application has a lot of versatility and allows users to add, update, and view posts on multiple blogs through the one application. Users can also view and edit pages and approve blog post comments.  Additionally, if users have added the stats plugin, they are able to view basic stats about their blog, including traffic.

Tumblr: Tumblr iPhone app users can post photos, video, audio, quotes, links, and text from their phone, as well as handle multiple blogs via the single application. Tumblr posts can also be scheduled or tweets can be customized. Users can search the iPhone contacts to see if they have a Tumblr account.

Blogger: The Blogger application allows users to monitor and edit more than one blog and add photos instantly to posts. Users can also labels, save drafts, or automatically publish posts.

Social Media Marketing Applications

Sendible: The Sendible user via an iPhone experiences a similar interface to the online computer version of Sendible.com. Users can send the same message from multiple accounts as well as schedule when messages go out. Sendible has a free account version, as well as paid monthly membership, depending on usage and accounts.

Tweetdeck: Tweetdeck is similar to Sendible, but most users use the free version of this service.

 

These are just a sample of the several iPhone applications that are available for internet and social media marketing professionals.

What are your favorite iPhone applications?

How To Be Retweet Worthy – 3 Tips to Get More Retweets

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Many bloggers have great success driving traffic to their blogs through Twitter.  However, you’ll only get so far on Twitter if all you do is tweet your own articles all the time.  Twitter is a community, and you need to spend time building your network of brand advocates who learn to recognize your name and expect great content from you.  This is a form of loyalty that builds over time through your consistent tweeting of great content — your own and content from other publishers across the web.

But that’s not all! Check out the tips below to get more retweets!

1. Format for Retweets

Not only do you need to tweet content that is interesting, relevant and adds value to your target audience, but you also need to format your tweets for optimum retweetability.  The first thing you need to do is to make sure the link you include in your tweet stays intact when your tweet is retweeted.  Don’t stick your link at the end of your tweet!  Instead, move it toward the beginning of the tweet, so people can add their own message when they retweet it without worrying about losing the link (or worse — not noticing that the link was lost in the retweet).

2. Track Your Tweeted Links

Next, make sure you use a URL shortener that you can track.  While it might be quicker and easier to simply tweet any old link without worrying about the structure of that link, there is more to URL shorteners than saving characters.  Use a tool like bit.ly or snurl or another URL shortener that allows you to create a free account, so you can track the clicks on the URLs you share.  Analyze which links get the most clicks, so you can get a better understanding of what kind of content your followers are interested in enough to click on the link you provide.  That’s the kind of content you want to keep providing, so you get retweeted more often and build a larger audience of engaged followers.

Remember, it’s better to have a smaller number of highly engaged followers who actively click on your links, retweet your content, and correspond with you than it is to have a larger number of inactive followers that click the Follow button then disappear.  Quality trumps quantity if you’re truly using Twitter to build your blog for the long-haul.

3. Be Shareworthy

Next, make sure the content you tweet is shareworthy.  If you’re tweeting content that no one is interested in, then they won’t retweet your content or engage with you at all.  Monitor your shortened URLs for clicks as well as your @replies to keep track of which tweets are being shared.  Get to know your audience, so you can deliver more content that they’re likely to share with their own followers, thereby building your online reputation (and your blog traffic) even more.

Twitter doesn’t drive a flood of traffic to your blog overnight, but with consistent and persistent effort, you can build relationships with your Twitter followers and slowly build your blog, too.  Don’t give up.  Just take the time to do your research and learn what makes your tweets shareworthy and retweet-worthy to your target audience.  If you don’t take that step, your efforts won’t reach their full potential.

Image: jasonh1234 on deviantArt

5 Ways to Drive a Buzz about Your Events Using Social Media

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Whether you’re a blogger, business owner, or individual with an event to promote, you can spread the word and drive an online buzz about it using the free tools of the social Web.

Some tools integrate directly into popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn while others not only let you promote your event but also let you search for events, people who might want to attend your own event, and more.  Suffice it to say, the social Web offers everything you need to create a successful event buzz at your fingertips!

Following are five easy-to-use and free social media tools that you can use to promote your online and offline events across the social Web: [Read more…] about 5 Ways to Drive a Buzz about Your Events Using Social Media

Dave Grohl: Another celebrity disses Twitter

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Outspoken Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has laid into Twitter, or — more accurately — the people who use it, suggesting that they are wasting their time.

“F**k Twitter! That’s the biggest waste of time. If people got their head out of their ass, they might f**king get out and accomplish something.”

Presumably, he’s hurling his insult at the stereotypical couch potato Twitter user who simply tweets about what they’ve just had for lunch, rather than the myriad of interesting people (both celebrities and not) who update their Twitter accounts with interesting and insightful words.

Funny how Grohl chose to waste his time slating a service he doesn’t like. Many people who don’t use Twitter just get on with their lives without making a big fuss in order to garner some publicity.

Via

Microblogging drives mobile Internet usage

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If you’re in any doubt that adding geotagging to Twitter is a good idea, the latest survey from Novarra has found that microblogging services are driving the use of the mobile Internet.

In the past year, mobile usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com — near-essential for sharing links on Twitter — has leapt by 1,068%, while page views of Twitter grew by 3,500% in the first half of 2009.

VP of marketing at Novarra, Randy Cavaiani, said that Twitter was a great viral tool for exposing consumers to new and interesting content.

These statistics are bound to be encouraging for those pushing uptake of the mobile Internet, and it’s not too surprising that Twitter is particularly popular given that interesting things generally happen when users are mobile.

Increased functionality, such as geotagging, more interesting third-party apps, and more mobile operators opening up Twitter via SMS, should propel Twitter usage even further.

Twitter geotagging: Will you be using the new service?

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Do you Twitter from your mobile device while on the go, or do you tend to use the service from the comfort of your home computer?

Twitter’s recent announcement that it has added geotagging capabilities to its API means that we will soon see a number of third-party Twitter applications taking advantage of that.

Geotagging is one of the latest crazes, it seems, with many devices now containing GPS devices and making the task very easy.

Yet, while taking photos and geotagging them some time later has few privacy concerns (assuming you’ve granted permission to share the photos on a service such as Flickr), tweeting from an identifiable location raises some possible concerns.

Whereas manual tweeting means you can be a little vague about your exact location (West London, for example), broadcasting your GPS location means it’s possible for people to track where you are.

In the ideal, friendly world, this is a fantastic feature because it allows you to find your friends and other interesting people.

Without being alarmist, a slightly more sinister world may require some care to be taken. After all, unless you’ve made your Twitter account private, you could be tracked by anyone, and the fact that geotagging happens with each tweet means you can’t even delay revealing your current location.

What do you think of geotagging for tweets? Will you be using the new feature?