by Devin Sugameli

Have you ever spent hours writing what you expect to be your greatest work, only to bemoan the utter lack of visits to your blog post 24 hours later? Wonder why you just can’t seem to break 100 RTs, or even 50? It might be that your content just isn’t as great as you think it is. But if you’ve requested critical reviews and received mostly positive feedback from a number of objective sources (friends & family don’t count) it could be anything from bad timing to a bad title to just plain bad luck. Assuming your content is good, we have 5 quick tips for boosting your Twitter virality:

1. Keep the title short and snappy. Remember that anyone who loves your post still only has 140 characters to spare. If your title is taking up even half of that, you risk losing out on followers adding their own commentary to the tweet – an endorsement more valuable than a simple RT.

2. Choose your tags wisely. Do add relevant tags to all of your posts. Don’t add a tag for every other word in the hopes that search engines will bring your blog post to the top of the results page for its one-line Michael Jackson reference.

3. Write about or quote other twitter users. If you write about or credit a fellow tweep in your post, especially one who’s using twitter to promote themselves or their business, you’re likely to pick up a few RTs from them. Make sure they see your post by @replying them directly or including their handle in the title so they can’t miss it.

4. Attach a popular, relevant hashtag. Popular hashtags are an easy way to get in front of a lot of eyeballs at once. If your content is current, it’s likely that the subject of your post has a matching hashtag already in use. Attach it to your own tweets so that anyone watching the hashtag at that moment will see it.

5. Don’t post before noon on Mondays! A 2008 study looked at the best times and days to publish content. Software developer Jake Luciani found that writers who posted on Thursdays had the greatest success in terms of comments, votes, and inbound links. Outside of weekends, Mondays were the worst days. The best times to post were between 1pm-3pm (after lunch) or 5pm-7pm PST (after work).

**Update [3/25]: As John Bethume of B2B Memes pointed out, it’s possible that the time you promote may make more of a difference than the time your posts publish. Thanks for sharing, John!

Do you have any personal tips for drawing more attention to your blog? Let us know in the comments! And of course, if you’d like to try to prove Jake Luciani wrong and RT this Monday post, we won’t complain.

by Kristen Malzone

Webdigi posted a blog on Monday about their successful integration of Google Analytics on their Facebook fan page. They even created a tool you can use to generate the Google Analytics code for your fan page on Facebook. This is extremely valuable information because Facebook Insights only provide a limited amount of information to fan page administrators. Here are 3 reasons why you Google Analytics on your fan page:

1) Tracking Non-Fan Activity

Facebook Insights only track the activity of users who have become a fan of your business’ page. With Google Analytics, you can track activity of all visitors (including non-fans). Trackable statistics include: visits, average time on site, visitor location, and more!

2) Analyzing Reliable, User-Friendly Data

Information provided by the Facebook Insights application is not always accurate or available for that matter. Facebook is growing rapidly and sometimes functions of the site are down. Some of the information provided by Google Analytics is the same, but it’s always good to have a backup for your business. Also, the enhanced graphics and charts in Google Analytics reports are much easier to navigate and are more aesthetically pleasing for presentation purposes.

3) Optimizing Your Landing Tab

Facebook does not track the activity on each individual FBML tab your page displays to users. Google Analytics allows you to track the success of each tab individually if you generate a separate code for each tab. This will help you identify which tabs are effective and which are not. Your fan page landing tab should include a call-to-action (i.e. “Become a Fan!”). Google Analytics can help you track the conversion rate and the increased or decreased success rate once you make changes to the tab.

Convinced yet? Here are the steps Webdigi came up with to get started:

1) Setup Google Analytics account. If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name. You will finally get your tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2
2) Create your custom img tag for each of your pages you like to track. EG: contact form, services, products etc. You can use our tool to create the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages.
3) Add the entire custom image html tag from step 2 to the bottom of each Facebook fan page that you need to track.

Have you successfully integrated Google Analytics onto your fan page? Share your experience by commenting here!

By: Shannon Aronin

Back in the early 90s, many of us enjoyed the PBS show Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? Today’s technology would have made the gumshoes job a whole lot easier.

Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, now Google Buzz, and even Twitter allow users to announce to the world their exact location, right down to latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. What do we get out of these services? The same thing we get out of other social media sites: connection with friends, opportunities to meet like-minded people, get reviews on useful products and venues from people we trust, and sometimes just bragging rights. From a marketing perspective, brands are salivating at the thought of being able to target deals to consumers in their immediate geographic area, and rightly so. Most users will enjoy the deals; imagine walking down main street and being able to choose a restaurant based on who sends you a better deal on your phone.

So what’s the down side? I’m not a privacy nut. My entire life is well documented on Facebook and Twitter. I frequently announce where I am going and cool things I am doing. I know that this is public information. Please Rob Me believes that these sites are dangerous because they announce that you are not home, making you vulnerable to burglars. Foursquare had some great comebacks to this idea, namely that criminals don’t need your tweets to rob you. They have always been able to case a home, call, or just see if the lights are on.

Getting robbed is lousy. You lose your stuff, your house is usually turned upside down and victims tend to feel very violated. But we have homeowner’s insurance, stuff is only stuff, and it could always be worse. My concern with these services is a little different. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to announce where you are when you are out and about. I am much more concerned about the personal safety and well-being of myself and my family.  So what can go wrong using these services?

• You could forget and tweet you are at the beach when you took a sick day at work.
• You could decide a guy is not worth a second date, but he is convinced he is so he finds opportunities to “bump into you.”
• If you have any kind of job that attracts attention (reporters, celebrities, police officers, prosecuting attorneys, record producers, etc.) you may not want every professional contact, people you have angered, or people who will stop at nothing just to meet you to know exactly where you are.

The question becomes do the benefits outweigh the risks? The answer is it depends. What is your privacy threshold? Everyone has their line – what am I uncomfortable sharing with everyone? In the world of social media where transparency and authenticity are key, that line is either nonexistent or pretty far away for industry thought leaders and enthusiasts. 

The good news is that most of these services require that users opt in. What’s more, you can decide what geographic location you share with others. If you are at a friend’s home you can be pushing out their address too, something your friends might not appreciate.

Here’s the bottom line – be cautious. Before you tweet out your exact location, stop for just a second and ask yourself if doing so at that time and place could be dangerous to you or others. It’s the most obvious of statements, but be aware that the internet is a public place and you should take reasonable precautions. There are definitely times when these services can be useful. I am advocating the idea of safe and thoughtful geotagging.

Do you use geotagging to let people know where you are? What services/sites do you use? Are you uncomfortable sharing your location, and if so what is your reason, especially if you are quite social on other sites and often share where you are without coordinates? What do you love about geotagging applications?

By Shannon Aronin 

On Saturday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs joined “the Twitter.”

Now tweeting from the @PressSec account, his follower count on Saturday grew by more than 1,000 per hour. By Monday morning he put out his third tweet and was up to 18,000 followers. I guess people really want to hear what Robert Gibbs has to say on Twitter. Why did it take Gibbs so long to get on? It’s not, as he famously said in July, because Twitter was blocked on White House computers. 

At that time he also said that he felt like he was on camera enough already for people to know what he was doing. Since then Twitter has not gone away and has continued to grow. The President sent his first tweet personally in response to the earthquake in Haiti. Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton tweets. The White House Press Corps tweets. What took him so long to get with the program? Isn’t the Press Secretary, y’know, supposed to keep up with the media?

Whatever the reason Robert Gibbs has decided to start tweeting now, we’re glad he’s on board! He asked for tips, so here are the Top Ten, courtesy of @theKbuzz:

1. Don’t call it “the Twitter.” Take the time to learn the lingo. You have enough underlings that I am sure one of them could explain everything you need to know in about half an hour.

2. Don’t be the guy with 100K followers (at this rate you will get there pretty soon!) that follows no one. Follow the White House Press Corps. Watching a feed of them might give you useful insights in what questions they will ask and will help build your relationship with them. Follow Congress too. 

3. Learn how to use hashtags (#s). You were already watching a stream when you decided to get on Twitter, keep watching those streams. Filtered streams, as you saw, are amazing for their ability to express reactions at particular moments in time.

4. You have a pretty bully pulpit of your own. No name calling, but tell us inside scoops from which Senators are holding up a bill to what’s being served at a state dinner.

5. Tweet often. Engage. Respond. Right now you are getting a lot of attention; the rate at which you have been acquiring followers is astounding. It would take some kind of algorithm to sort through it all. Let all that simmer. Give it a week or two when the heat is off, and Twitter will lighten up. Then you can use it as a real and powerful two-way communications tool.

6. Maintain your voice. You represent the country. Don’t try to be too hip just because you’re on Twitter. It’s not something you should just push out political news on though either. If @BarackObama says something funny, quickly run it through that smart press secretary mind to make sure it’s appropriate, then tweet it. Tell us why you love your family/golf/life. Just… be yourself. Smart, official but most of all, a real human being.

7. Twitter is very democratic. You can communicate with anyone who cares. Use it to add context at events. Let’s say you are at a town hall meeting. At the start of that meeting you alert attendants to the #. Then when the president is answering questions, but someone tweets a follow-up or related question about what the President is saying that is valuable, the best time to respond is right away. Your responsiveness in this way will be buzzworthy.

8. Use Twitter strategically. The job of a Press Secretary often requires being political with non-politicians, namely journalists. If you scoop them by giving information directly to the people first, the journalists might get annoyed. On the other hand, announcing something important on Twitter can be used to frame a policy debate.

9. Expand your idea of journalist. Check out @ariannahuff , @dailydish (Andrew Sullivan), @anamariecox and @markos (Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas). Bloggers really can have journalistic integrity and talent. These are just a few examples. 

10.  Recognize your power. With so many followers and such a high profile, one tweet from you can catapult someone’s visibility. Be generous and retweet.

@PressSec, good luck, and welcome to Twitter!

What advice would you give to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs as he eases into Twitter?

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, is speaking today at Advertising Week in New York. She is expected to make a major announcement about a partnership with Nielsen to create a program called “Brand Lift”  that was first reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal and covered by Mashable and AllFacebook.

Sandberg’s entire speech, entitled “Knowing is Better,” will be live-broadcast on Facebook Marketing’s Fan Page, and we’ll have live updates and analysis here @ Buzz Marketing Daily as well.

Stay tuned – it should be an exciting day in social media marketing!

Update: 11:20 AM Sheryl has just begun her presentation, which ran late because of an earlier presentation at Advertising Week from Reverend Al Sharpton.

11:30 Sheryl has covered the basics of marketing on Facebook, which all of our readers know already.

11:45 Sheryl has introduced the CEO of Nielsen, David Calhoun, and Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures and announced that Facebook and Nielsen have entered into a relationship.  Times to update their relationship status. Nielsen will help to verify the effectiveness of brand advertising on Facebook and provide real-time feedback to client advertisers.

11:55 All 3 are answering questions now about the partnership. Someone just asked “How do big brands connect with their fans on Facebook?” Sheryl answered “Authenticity.” We 2nd that, and we’ll add: Call theKbuzz.

12:00 The presentation just concluded. We have to say, aside from the Nielsen announcement, there wasn’t much new to us or social-media-savvy readers. I will say this: The Facebook/Nieslen partnership does have the potential to legitimize brand reach advertising, not just online on Facebook, but online in general. Still, we can’t help but think this still misses the point of the real promise of social media advertising and marketing. The 2 best uses of advertising on Facebook are:

1) To build up a huge, targeted fan-base after which companies can then have “free” engagement, forever

2) To use the unparalleled, robust hypertargeting keywords feature to target customers based not just on demographics, but on keyword targeting (which Sheryl surprisingly didn’t really address at all).

While Fortune 500 companies may want costly reach blocks on Facebook, targeting millions of people and verified by Nielsen- the vast majority of the millions of global small businesses and non-profits can utilize Fan Pages alone and the self-serve Ad Platform to better build their Fan base.

Blogging is so 2001, thank you very much.

That is to say, I have been blogging since I created my good ol’ LiveJournal 7 years ago. I even still have my xanga from “back in the day” (i.e. high school). And I feel incredibly at ease now that blogging is an integral part of my job.

But apparently Wired thinks that all of my blogs, whether business or personal, are essentially useless when competing with newer forms of social media.

What I really don’t understand is the author’s primary assertion that authentic, read-and-repost worthy material is ignored these days, buried beneath all of the professional clutter: namely, the top 100 blogs. So is it only the top 100 that stand a fighting chance of making a lasting impression? It’s true that if you want a successful blog without a big, fancy brand name backing you, you might have to do it the old fashioned way; you might actually have to reach out to other bloggers and Diggers and Stumblers and even your Facebook friends and link them to your intense post.

Really, at the heart of what the author, Paul Boutin, is trying to communicate is the idea that most people just can’t be bothered to blog – and why should they when Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter make it so much easier to share our thoughts and feelings in short snippets? Well, on this point I will only agree so much as to say that the average person should not blog with the expectation that hundreds of readers will flock to their site to ooh and ahh over their opinions. That being said, I do strongly believe that anybody with anything worthwhile to say should allocate the personal resources to get their words out there and give them the full attention and detail that they deserve! I think that there is a place for standard blogging alongside newer forms of microblogging. Why give up on one when they can compliment one another?

Perhaps above all, it is the following comment that so clearly ignites my fury in regards to this topic:

“As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter’s character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase. @WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?”

“It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase”? Heaven forbid we ask our bloggers to be intelligent, insightful, and careful in their writing before posting it to the blogosphere!

I guess in the end I will compromise with Paul Boutin and say this: If you want to start a useless blog, put bare minimum effort into it, and will be upset when you can’t build a significant following, then kill the idea right now. If you are smart, well written, and have something to contribute to any community anywhere, then please don’t hesitate to start your blog… and then share it with me when it’s ready!

DonorsChoose.org is a non-profit web site that allows people to help fund classrooms across the United States. Teachers submit proposals for their classroom needs, including the amount needed to reach their goals. Random people search the website, read the proposals, find one that particularly speaks to them, and donate! Simple as that. It is personal, too. Everyone who donates can expect at least a thank-you note from the classes they choose to donate to. DonorsChoose.org is holding a Bloggers Challenge for the month of October.

Six Apart offered [on LiveJournal, Vox, Movable Type, and TypePad] to anyone who emailed them by September 30th, a free $30 gift certificate to be used for donation to the cause. But the list of participants in Blogger Challenge does not end there. This is obviously a really important cause, and Americans are stepping up to the challenge.

I received my $30 gift certificate today via e-mail, and it went right to the ESL preschoolers at Buffalo Public School #45, an international school that is 93% low income. DonorsChoose is really making a difference. As of today, $166,530 has been donated to 9,450 schools in New York State (not including NYC) alone!

I can’t help but give this cause 5 bees.