Finding Entities to Follow on Twitter

Twitter has an advanced search tool that can be used to find and follow people and businesses that meet specific criteria that can be defined and refined to meet one’s information needs. These can benefit a person’s business by creating an avenue for cross promotion of ideas or collaboration.

The advanced search tool is a bit difficult to locate in the twitter interface and one has to drill around to find it. The best way to get there is if someone provides you a link or if you Google it to get a link.

My online business is about information technology ideas and their dissemination. I used “IT Security”, “ethical hacker” and a few other terms to search on in order to get a list of people and businesses to follow. A few examples that I chose to follow are: @ChrisJohnRiley, @Joey_Hernandez, @ethicalhack3r, @teamcymru, @whitehatsec. I am following a total of 23 entities right now.

Effective Use Of Visual Media

It is difficult to get a highly technical concept across to an audience without using visual media. Also, general advertising and marketing are most easily done through visual media to promote the services and strengths of a company. YouTube is famous for building enthusiasm and for sharing landmark ideas that businesses want to put out there for others to know about.

 

Three companies, similar to mine, that use visual social media venues are RedSpin, eLearnSecurity and Dell SecureWorks.  Each of them have multiple YouTube videos posted marketing their business and security practice.

 

All three companies have at least one video advertising their services. First, RedSpin has a clean cut image that looks like it was done for television. Then, eLearnSecurity looks good also and includes a call to action for people to sign up. Finally, SecureWorks has a mix of different styles of video that are all entertaining.  All three companies seem to have created effective marketing and technical followings by using the social media venue of YouTube.

The Visual Opportunity On Social Networks

My business is information and process based. There could be huge amounts of detailed information. The top four social networks of a visual nature are YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest.

YouTube and Tumblr would be where I would spend the most time, energy and effort because those two media venues would allow me to do tech updates, “chalk talks” and deep dive demonstrations.

 

YouTube videos can be simple or complicated and there is lots of information about how to make different types of video demonstrations. People can play the videos over and over again to learn what they want.

 

Tumblr is a way to micro-blog. It allows for expression through text, photos, audio and video. It is very flexible and allows for operations in many different business venues.

 

Pinterest and Instagram are picture based media. Instagram works best with mobile devices and can be used to render professional looking images with tools they have built-in. Pinterest seems to me to be very powerful but complicated to use.

Scheduling Advanced Posts On Facebook

I have been experimenting with scheduling posts in Facebook so that I can write them ahead of time and then have them show up at a later, predetermined, date and time. Basically this is done by going to the status bar and choosing the type of post I want and then initiating it in the dialog box. Once that is done I can choose the little clock icon and it walks you through selecting the date and time for the post to appear.

The first three depicted here are scheduled an hour apart. I wanted to make sure that over the course of the morning I would have time to monitor that the process worked.

The first entry is a listing of top malnet entry points that was scheduled on Friday, March 8^th to show up on the 9^th at 10:10am.  The second entry is a listing of talent areas that are needed in information technology at the management level. Again this was scheduled on the 8^th to be run on the 9^th at 11:10am and finally the third was a comment about the new law prohibiting the act of jailbreaking a cell phone. It was created on the 8^th and scheduled to be run on the 9^th at 12:10pm. 

These three posts all cover different areas of information technology and should be of interest to the target audience of the site. Malnets are a hot topic of discussion because of the damage they can do to a network and their destructive capabilities on an individual system. Everyone in IT has to constantly be updating their skills and “sharpening the saw” so to speak so the skills posting will always have relevance. Finally, the last post is really a personal rant that I think most people will agree with and will add an opportunity for comments and debate on the page.

The next two posts I scheduled, have to do with satellites and I am adding them to add a variety for people.

They are scheduled to run on Sunday the 10th of March 2013.

Using Facebook To Form Strategic Alliances

I have “liked” twenty-three Facebook pages for my business site. Seven are technical in nature and complement my site on Facebook.

They are:

1.       Tech Junkies

2.       123InkJets

3.       Redspin, Inc.

4.       Secure Ninja

5.       Sword and Shield Security

6.       Dell Secure Works

7.       Security On Demand

 

Those were chosen because I would like to make strategic alliances with those businesses. I believe that can be done in the following ways: I can make a live connection with the other page administrators and cross-promote each other; I can host a webinar with the other companies that have a similar audiences; I can participate on other pages where their audience is already having conversations on topics I cover.

The other sites I chose to like are those of budding social media pundits that have businesses I am interested in.

Facebook Page Post Insights

Facebook has what are known as “page post insights.” It is a group of statistics that provide information to a page administrator about what is happening with the usage of that page. The following terms are used in the “Page Post Metrics” page on Facebook’s help center. (There are others besides these four.)

 

Reach is the number of people who have seen your post. Figures are for the first 28 days after a post's publication and include people viewing your post on both desktop and mobile. Your post counts as having reached someone when it is loaded and shown in News Feed.

 

Engaged Users is the number of people who have clicked anywhere on your post.

People Talking About This is the number of people who have created a story from your Page post. Stories include:

·         Sharing, liking or commenting on your post

      ·         Answering a question
      ·         Responding to an event
      ·         Claiming an offer

Virality is the number of people who have created a story from your post as a percentage of the number of people who have seen it.

 

A business can use Facebook Insights to gauge the success of their Facebook marketing campaign, and make adjustments to better meet the interests of the demographic profile of site visitors. Insights provide critical information about customers but the information is dynamic; one must track the insight statistics continually and monitor for changes.