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No matter whether you’re a social media novice, aficionado, or expert, there is bound to be something in this book you can glean from. It’s a great resource for teachers and students, and it covers all of the basis from blogging to the importance of a social media plan.

If you’ve read this book, let me know your thoughts. I’d love to glean from you, and learn what has and has not worked. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you can buy it below.

The Social Media Survival Guide by Deltina Hay

You can learn more about Deltina by visiting her website, Social Media Power, or following her @Deltina.

Stay social, my friends!

Erick

I posted the question on the SEO Bridges fan page, “Which social bookmarking site do you use?”  Below are stats of the top four social bookmarking sites in the U.S. to help you decide if any of them might work for your purposes.

Tumblr:

17% of people who use Tumblr are ages 13-17, 37% are 18-34, 30% are 35-49, and 15% are 50 or older.

15.76% (the highest concentration) of people who use Tumblr come from Facebook and 14.44% go to Facebook.

41.37% of people who use Tumblr immediately come from search engine or social media sites and 39.75% immediately go to search engines or social media sites.

Reddit:

8% of people who use Reddit are ages 13-17, 35% are 18-34, 32% are 35-49, and 25% are 50 or older.

11.13% (The highest concentration) of people who use Reddit come from Imgur.com amd 12.36% go to Imgur.com (Less than 5% come from or go to Facebook).

35.54% of people who use Reddit come from search engines or social media sites and 35.04% go to search engines or social media sites.

Stumbleupon:

9% of people who use Stumbleupon are ages 13-17, 30% are 18-34, 32% are 35-49, and 28% are 50 or older.

10% of people who use Stumbleupon come from Facebook and 9.63% go to Facebook (The highest concentration).

37.64% of all people who use Stumbleupon go to search engines or social media sites and 37.35% go to search engines or social media sites.

Digg:

11% of all people who use Digg are ages 13-17, 39% are 18-34, 30% are 35-49, and 19% are 50 or older.

10.98% come from Google and 8.78% go to Google (the highest concentration).

40.73% of all people who use Digg come from search engines or social media sites and 37.57% go to search engines or social media sites.

If you’d like to check out these or other stats, you can find them on Alexa.com and Quantcast.com.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Too often, I see people misusing social media, so I compiled this list of ten ways you should not use social media sites. I am sure more could be added to this list. Would you add any? I’d love to hear from you.

1. Don’t tweet about yourself and/or your products all day. People will notice if you only talk about yourself and link to your site.

2. Don’t send e-mails to webmasters of other sites, asking them to exchange links with you. Yes, you can still do this, as long as it’s within Google’s guidelines, but it’s not effective. Here’s what Google has to say about building links.

3. Don’t Add people to Facebook groups without their permission. Yes, Facebook enabled a group feature in which group owners can add people. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did this to better monitor which users are using Facebook for self-serving purposes.

4. Don’t comment spam on people’s blogs just to get links back to your blog. Write thoughtful responses rather than copying and pasting canned blog comment responses.

5. Don’t post comments on blogs that have nothing to do with your site. Google looks at what types of sites link to you. They want to see that quality sites similar to your site link to you.

6. Don’t Ignore people. It doesn’t take that much time to answer a person’s question, thank them for a retweet, or just engage.

7. Don’t buy Twitter followers and Facebook friends. People who do this are breaking Twitter’s TOS. While I can find nothing in Facebook’s TOS about auto-friends, they will suspend your account if you make too many friends requests at once.

8. Don’t Tweet about where you are and what you’re doing, unless it serves your bottom line. It’s okay to send out occasional personal updates because that helps keep social media social, but people don’t need to know about your personal life every 15 minutes.

9. Don’t sign up for a social media service and then leave it. It’s easy to sign-up for a social bookmarking site, decide it’s not worth the time to use a site that ranks 50,000 according to Alexa, get frustrated because you can’t figure out how to delete your account, and then forget about it.

10. Don’t use social media to spam people. This includes posting 20 tweets at once, sending your followers continuous direct messages about your site or products, or using social media for guerilla marketing and not social engagement.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

So, first thing’s first.  I owe TweetDeck an apology.  I said in yesterday’s blog they don’t allow users to schedule Tweets.  Their latest version, which was never updated on my computer, does allow users to schedule Tweets.  So, I apologize for the misinformation; though, if my computer did not automatically update TweetDeck, there are probably millions of other computers operating outdated versions.

Moving on . . . . If you want to drive traffic to your website, try writing a blog.  It doesn’t have to be everyday, but write one at least once a week.  Don’t just let it sit there.  Tell the world.  If you just write your blog and expect search engines to do all the work for you, you won’t get many views.

Various social bookmarking sites and niche social networking sites integrate with sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  That makes it easier for social media gurus, ninjas, and connoisseurs to let the world know about their blogs and other pertinent information.  Also, those Twitter clients I mentioned yesterday integrate with larger social networking sites.

Think of it like standing on a stage in the center of an NFL football stadium filled with tens of thousands of people.  The football stadium represents Twitter, Facebook, and whatever other social networking sites you use to attract your audience.  The audience . . . well, they represent your audience.  You can shout your message and a few hundred people may hear you, but several thousand won’t.  You’d have a much easier time getting your message out to those tens of thousands of people if you set up microphones and speakers.  Social bookmarking is like those microphones and speakers that allow you to get your message out to a wider audience.

Any thoughts?  How do you use social bookmarking?

Stay social,

Erick

For those who take the time to learn how to navigate it correctly, Google Analytics can be a very effective social media monitoring tool. Here are four ways to use Google Analytics to monitor the sentimentality of how people are engaging with your site. These four methods monitor bounce rate, but don’t forget to monitor exit pages.

1. Traffic Sources >> All Traffic Sources >> View Full Report (Located at the bottom of top traffic sources): Check your site’s bounce rate from people coming from social networking and social bookmarking sites. Stop posting to social networking sites where your bounce rate is the highest and more often where it is the lowest.

2. Traffic Sources >> Search Engines: Click on the search engines, and you’ll see which words people are searching for that are causing a high or low bounce rates. Change your blogging style according to your bounce pattern.

3. Content >> Content by Title: Look at which blogs people are going to most often and which blogs have the lowest bounce rates, and change your blogging style accordingly.

4. Visitors >> Visitor Trending >> Bounce Rate: On the right side, above the graph, select the clock: See what hours people are less likely to bounce from your site and post links to your blogs in social bookmarking sites at those times.

Are there any other ways you use Google Analytics as a Social Media Monitoring tool? I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Stay social,

Erick

The best way to integrate your Web content with your social media marketing campaign is to write a blog at least once a week and use social media to promote it. The more you write and promote your writing, the more people will become familiar with your name and your site.

Blog about whatever your site’s about.  If your site’s about politics, blog about politics and use political keywords.  But use language that allows your writing to remain accessible to anyone who might read your blog.

Let others know about your blog by posting it to social networking sites.  But don’t stop with Twitter and Facebook.  Set up accounts on social bookmarking sites like Deli.cio.us, Digg, and Reddit.  Web browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox have apps that automatically fill in content for you on those and many other social bookmarking sites.  You can even integrate many of those sites with larger ones like Twitter and Facebook, so they automatically update when you update your Facebook or Twitter accounts.

The Internet allows people to do faster for free what it took several weeks and dollars to do less than ten years ago.  It takes time to setup and update those accounts, but the return on the investment is worth it.

Stay social,

Erick

Every week, I try to bring you Open Source software for you social media marketing endeavors that I am able to test out first. That, of course, means it must be simple enough for someone like me to use. This week, I am going to tell you about a program that I am not going to download, but I hope to give you an easy-to-use tutorial that will help you get started with it. Elgg is a powerful Open Source social networking platform. Well, that is what they claim to be, but I am going to take their word for it.

For those who like to read and explore for themselves, here’s what’s in Elgg according to Elgg (that means they wrote it, and I am giving credit to them):

Profiles

Elgg comes with default profile fields that can be extended or completely customized by the site administrator.

Activity Streams

The granular activity stream feature ensures you keep up to date with all site activity.

Blogging / Microblogging

Blogging and microblogging functionality that is both powerful, yet simple to use.

Pages

Create documents collaboratively with full control over read and write access.

RSS / JSON

All content – such as blog posts, activity streams and group discussions – is available in both RSS and JSON formats

Widgets

Add widgets to user profiles.

Video

Search for your favorite videos on services such as Youtube and add them to your Elgg video gallery.

Social bookmarking

Share your web resources with others in your company, group or course.

Groups

Collaborate around specific topics via public, private or hidden groups.

Access controls

Control who can access your content.

Web Services API

Expose functionality through the REST API by building a plugin and either publish the API for other developers to build clients, or provide your own.

Documents

Upload and share documents with the rest of your network.

Photo Gallery

Using the powerful Tidypics plugin, let your users create their own photo galleries.

For those who would like to know more about how they  can use Elgg for their social media marketing, there are plenty of plugins to explore, including plugins for events, photos and images, widgets, games, site and user admin, and more. There is also a forum for those who want to know the latest about what is going on in the world of Elgg. For those who want to download Elgg, it includes bug fixes and security enhancements. For those who want to experience Elgg, but do not want to download it, they can sign up for more information here.  For those who need help uploading it, here is a great video. (Video coding and me ain’t getting along too well this week).

Okay, so that’s it for this week. Enjoy. And please tell me what you like or don’t like about this blog. I’ll try to get a live video on here for all you visual people. Oh yeah, thank you all for your comments.

Erick