Is Facebook Going To Lose Social Media Consultants Clients?

During my normal perusal of Twitter, I noticed something from Chris Brogan. His tweet was about possibly deleting his Facebook profile. It caught my attention and clicked on the link that brought me to his website.

He had written a quick post about the ads on Facebook. Basically he had seen a couple of inappropriate ads talking about women cheating and sexual encounters. I personally haven't seen any inappropriate ads on Facebook, but the reason I bring this up is a comment that I saw.

The comment was from Pete Codella, someone I hadn't heard of before but works in public relations and consults about social media. He said...

Chris - I couldn't agree with you more. I’ve also noticed some very distasteful ads on Facebook lately. It makes it increasingly difficult for me to be a proponent of using Facebook as part of a company’s online marketing and positioning strategy.

For someone who does consulting on social media or someone who is looking to do that for a living (me!) it's something that they need think about. Business are looking to get into the social media networks and if ads like those are riddled through Facebook, it might be hard to choose that network.

Facebook is such a big network that this one group of advertisements might be overlooked and seen as an anomaly, but who want their business associated with these ads? Facebook needs to be careful or they might lose those profiles and social media consultants might shy away and use other networks to promote their clients. It's just another thing to consider.

Non-Blogging Tips To Make You A Better Blogger

Well I am sitting in my living room with the wood stove burning and a blizzard outside and I got to thinking about some things I could do to make me a better blogger. So here are some non-blogging tips to become a better blogger.


Image courtesy of sean dreilinger

Adapt and evolve.
Being able to go with the flow and change when it's not working is an important trait to have in any one's life, but it is extremely important as a blogger. Recognizing trends and following them without totally immersing yourself in them will keep you up to date but allow you to diversify.

Just about everyone who runs a blog and a lot of people who run business and websites now have a Twitter profile. And if you don't have a Facebook page or at least doing some kind of social networking you are being left in the dust. The ability to adapt and evolve will make you a better blogger by connecting you with more people, which brings me to another tip.

Connect with as many people as you can.
I talked about Twitter and social networking sites above, but with them you are able to connect with so many more people than even just a couple of years ago. It use to be just your friends and the people you knew from high school that you were connected to online. But now we can connect with bloggers all over the world.

You know the saying, "It's not what you know, but who you know." It has always been true and continues to be true. Networking is a great way to get information and social networking websites make this easier. You can receive tips from a blogger in India or even find a job from someone Twitter that you might have never received because of the connection you have had online.

Sharing is caring.
Once you have your Twitter account or social network profile, make sure to give to the people following you or the people you are friends with. Giving little tips and sharing websites of others is a great way of portraying yourself as an expert. Every once in a while you can give links to your site, but shameless self promotion will lead to lots of unfollows and losing friends.

Twitter Desktop Clients

I've been off the computer for awhile now which means I've been off Twitter and haven't been blogging. I don't want to make this one of those "I'm sorry I haven't posted in a long time, but I promise I will post again soon," posts. Life just got in the way and my computer is broken.

Today I want to talk about Twitter and some of the desktop clients. What is a desktop client? Basically it's a third party application that allows you to receive your twitter updates without using the twitter.com website.

TweetDeck - website/download
TweetDeck feeds you up to the second tweets from the people you are following with a little beep and alert. It's much easier than being on the twitter website and pressing the refresh button. I have it downloaded on my computer and miss it on my girlfriends computer which I'm using now. You can put people in groups, resize the program, and get all the updates from twitter while you were sleeping.

Twirl - website/download
Twirl claims itself as "the social software client." Once I get my computer back i will download this program and test it out, but until then I will forward you to Rajeev @ mintblogger.com and his guide to Twirl. One feature that Twirl has that TweetDeck doesn't is the ability to connect to other social media sites other than Twitter.

If you would like to look at other Twitter desktop applications, check out the Twitter Downloads page. There are some others that look pretty cool.

What client do you use? Or do you just use the website? Leave a comment below.

Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook?

I've been without my computer for the last five days or so because of a busted power cord. So I have been using my girlfriends computer which doesn't have TweetDeck. Not having TweetDeck has left me out of the loop on Twitter. It's been weird so I have been forced to use the actual Twitter website and refresh the page.

Well this morning, Twitter has been...well...all a-twitter about a certain article. Even Newsweek tweeted about it. The article is entitled The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook.

But is it really the ultimate? It's probably very close. The article was written by Tamar Weinberg who is a social media consultant. She contributes to Mashable and other online publications and is a former contributor to Life Hacker, so hey, she has some clout.

She focuses mainly on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn but the information really can be used for any social networking site. Make sure to read the article and use the information, because everything you do online is there for every one to see.

Is Microblogging Realy Micro Blogging?

I wasn't a fan of microblogging or Twitter when I first heard about them, but I have come around. My problem with microblogging now is the word. Obviously the messages we send on Twitter-like services (something I will be posting about soon) are considerd micro, but are they really "blog-like?"

I've linked this site before, but Microblink shares news on all the microblogging news. Mike Templeton of microblink.com defined microblogging a month ago. Here is what he defines it as...

microblogging [mahy-kroh-blŏg-ing] verb
A small-scale form of blogging, generally made up of short, succinct messages, used by both consumers and businesses to share news, post status updates and carry on conversations.

It is definitely small-scale messages to share news, post status updates, and carry on conversations. But these short messages are basically instant messages sent to the people you are either friends with or are following you.

If you look at Wikipedia's definition of blogging you will see that basically sharing news is the only thing the two definitions have in common.

A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

Now I really like the definition Mike Templeton and the team from Microblink.com came up with, but I think the term microblogging still needs some work. I'm just really sure which direction that work needs to head.

Do you have any ideas? Do you agree or disagree? Leave a comment below.

Write Better Blog Posts With These 5 Tips

Writing better blog posts is something all of us strive to do. Not only will better written posts help convey the information to our reader better, but it will make our blog better and in turn bring more readers. So here are a few simple tips to help you write better blog posts.

Write shorter more concise articles.
Most readers won't read every word you write. They will scan the first sentence and generally the last sentence in paragraphs, so if you write smaller paragraphs with more information in them, the readers will in turn come away with a better understanding of what you wrote about.

Use interesting titles with keywords. Think newspaper headlines.
In most blogging platforms the title is used in creating the page your article will be posted on. Not only will the title attract the readers to that article when you first write it, but if they search through the archive it will grab their attention then. Well written titles will bring readers to that post for months to come.

Keywords will help in tagging the post in a certain category and also allow search engines to crawl it so people will find that article when searching for certain keywords.

Do not use simple generic words like "the" to start your titles.
If you start using "the" as the first word in your titles, your articles will get lost in the archives with all the other articles titled the same. Keywords will help, but try and pay a little more attention to the title as it will be the first thing readers see.

Use bold headlines to break up your posts and bring attention to certain parts.
Take for example this article. There are bold headlines basically giving you a one sentence summary of the paragraph below it. This way readers could essentially just read the bold headlines and still get just about all the information. It also breaks up the post so it feels like it's not just a bunch of words.

Write articles with both internal and external links.
Putting a lot of links into your post will cram as much information as you can into each one. Links to your own articles will, or internal links, will intertwine your posts and will help new readers to your blog find other relevant information. External links will give readers another perspective and even more information. And by linking others and sending traffic to other sites, hopefully they will link back to your articles too.

Update On 30 Day Blogging Challenge

Well the 30 blogging challenge is a week in and I've seen some good results already. My traffic has grown a little bit, even on the weekends.

I have found a little trouble writing a post every day. I'm not sure if it's some of the distractions surronding me lately or what but I'm trying to write a quality post every day. It's also hard with all of the other blogs about blogging out there to find something new to write about, but I'm working on it. Another regular post about everything blog will be posted tomorrow.