social media Archives - Stikky Media

4 Social Media Tasks You Should Never Automate

If you want to do it right, social media management takes a lot of time. So much so that it’s now some peoples’ full-time job. But not everyone has the budget to hire a social media manager or coordinator; enter Social Media Automation Tools. Programs like Buffer, Social Oomph, Hootsuite and many, many more all promise to make your social media management easier, more seamless and less time-consuming. However, it’s vital to not automate everything. In this blog, we’ll break down 4 social media tasks you should never automate and why.

Social media is still social, and nobody likes to talk to a robot when it comes to developing relationships (or talking in general). Some things still need to be done in real time, by a real human. Here are some social media tasks that should be done by humans, not automation. (more…)

The History And Meaning Of Your Favourite Hashtags

Do you know what’s the story behind your favourite hashtags? Learn more about #FollowFriday, #fail, #Shatnerday and more.

Plan for a Positive Brand Reputation Online

Plan like you have never planned before

People have many ways to complain about your business online and all of them are public. When you hear the term brand reputation what do you think of? I think of press releases, press conferences, special appearances, and interviews. This is what’s referred to as traditional public relations. Now that the Internet is the majority of people’s first interaction with a company it is important to create an online brand reputation plan. And plan like you’ve never planned before. The main goal of online brand reputation is to ensure that only positive results about your business show up in the search engines.

Optimize your positive materials

SEO or search engine optimization for brand reputation management involves improving the keywords and tagging of your company’s published materials. This will put a focus on your positive materials by pushing them to the top of the search engine results.

Content Creation for Brand Reputation

Creating positive content such as blog posts, social media profiles and websites and pairing it with SEO should overcome any negative comments or posts. I should mention here that you want all of these tactics to be proactive and you always want to be sure to create only content that is true. The key is to be transparent and approachable.

Traditional Tactics with a Modern Twist

The third tactic is to promote the positive things your business is doing in the community by submitting online press releases. Just like submitting a press release to a traditional media outlet, you would want the press release to go to an authoritative source. This could be a credible online newspaper, television station, or a government supported website just to name a few. Of course, what is considered authoritative will depend on what your business does or the type of product it sells.

The ethics of it all

Ethical practices around online brand reputation are still being discussed and worked out. As I mentioned before, you want to make sure that any content you are putting on the World Wide Web about your company is honest. The public needs to be able to have the choice to view what they want. On top of that, your company needs to deal with these negative comments on an interactive level. This could be as simple as responding to the customer’s complaint and offering ways to resolve it. With careful planning and positive interaction with customers, your company should be able to maintain an excellent online presence.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

5 Bad Social Media Habits You Should Give Up for Lent–And Forever

Lent is a 40-day period during which practicing Catholics give up something–usally a bad habit like smoking or drinking–to commemorate Jesus' 40 days of fasting in the desert.

But it's not just good for individuals. As business owners doing internet marketing, we can also develop bad social media habits. Want to give up something for Lent? Start by these less than desirable things we do on Facebook and Twitter.

1. Stop shilling on Facebook

Facebook may seem like a great place to promote or sell your services, but doing so insistently (or "shilling") will only drive followers away. Remember the social media mantra "People connect with people" and start behaving like a person instead of a business. Share employees' good news. Post pictures of your office. Ask interesting questions. You can even find ways to present a new product or service without making it look like an advertisement.

2. Stop Retweeting

Although retweeting can help spread a piece of content, a timeline that is filled with only retweets is not very attractive to new followers. Again, "people connect with people", and followers want to connect with a real person who has thoughts and emotions. Use Twitter to spread your brand's personality around, not other people's. And if you absolutely must retweet that piece, add a personal comment to it.

3. Move one-on-one conversations away from Facebook comments

This happens more often than you think, especially in customer relations. People are not interested in reading about how you're going to solve a client's problem. Whenever a Facebook comment risks pulling you into a long conversation, provide a contact email to move it to a more private space. Fans will thank you for it.

4. Stop using so many hashtags

Sure, hastags are useful to put a tweet in context, especially during major events. However, hashtagging every word from your tweet not only makes it unreadable, but it also makes you look like you can't formulate a coherent thought. Also, it's totally unethical to use popular hashtags that are unrelated to your business for promotion purposes. People pick up on it… and then pick on you.

5. Stop pre-programming your social media updates

Sure, it might seem useful to program Facebook and Twitter updates ahead of time, but you end up looking really insensitive if something major happens. On the other hand, taking advantage of timely events (as long as they're not tragic) to promote your products or services can work really well! Follow Oreo's example and tweet appropriately!

So, which of these bad habits are you willing to give up for Lent? Share your thoughts with us!

New Social Network: Vine

No, we’re not talking about a new wine-related social network (although that would be awesome), but rather a new video-based app now owned by Twitter called Vine. It’s all the rage these days, with celebrities like Tyra Banks and Emmy Rossum posting Vines on their Twitter feeds.

Here’s a quick Vine I made especially for this occasion:

Making afternoon tea @stikkymedia vine.co/v/bn6bIvA9HMe

— Anabelle Bernard F(@anabellebf) February 6, 2013

1. What does it do?

Vine is super simple: you take a 6-second video that the app posts as a video loop on Twitter and on Vine feeds. The video is looped automatically.

2. How does it work?

You start by downloading the app on your iPhone. There’s a simple tutorial in the app to show you how to make a video–it works by the touch of your finger.

After making your video, you can share it with your social networks.

3. Where can I share the videos?

The Twitter integration makes it easy to share the videos directly with your followers on Twitter. The app also connects to Facebook so you care share it with your fans as well. If you embed your Twitter feed on your website, you’ll also be able to share your videos that way.

4. How can I use it?

Vine can be useful for your internet marketing in a variety of ways. It gives you an opportunity to be creative and show your business from a fun, creative angle. You can take a funny video of the staff or show how your product works.

6 seconds doesn’t seem like much, but if you watch other people’s videos, you’ll see that you can fit in a lot of content in these few seconds. The advantage: you can make an impact before your audience’s attention span fades. And the best videos? People will watch them over and over again.

Think of Vine as a video version of Twitter: conciseness and originality are key. As with any new social network, it’ll take a while to unlock its full potential, but Vine’s popularity is growing so quickly that it can’t be ignored for very long.

8 Silly Grammar Mistakes That Are Killing Your Blog

The worst piece of writing advice I ever received? Write like you talk.

If you’ve ever eavesdropped on a conversation, you know that our verbal culture is an editor’s worst nightmare. Saturated with rotten grammar, half-baked ideas and a disturbing amount of likes, ums and y’knows, human speech isn’t exactly made for readability.

Superbowl XLVI Gets First-Ever Social Media Command Center

Superbowl XLVI has a Social Media Command Center. Seriously. While you’re tossing back chicken wings and yelling at the television screen, a team of 50 will be monitoring the digital field from the comfort of their 2,300 square foot space in downtown Indianapolis.

Mapping the World with Twitter and Flickr

Remember those light pollution—err… I mean those Earth at Night—maps that were so popular in the late 1990s? Well, it’s time to move on. Eric Fischer, Google programmer and digital map aficionado, has created something that will delight even the techiest of tech-lovers. Bye bye city lights, hello geotagged tweets and Flickr photos.

Foursquare Helps Tourism, but DMO’s Aren’t Checking In

Foursquare has over 6 million users and over 381 million check-ins, but very few DMO’s are using the using the geo-location service to boost tourism. Explore Chicago was the first to really get involved with Foursquare, and since then, only a handful of DMO’s have joined.

Social Media Done Right – Rosetta Stone

Note: Updated September 2018

I was first introduced to Rosetta Stone three years ago after it was recommended to me when I wanted to learn Danish in preparation for moving to Copenhagen. I was really impressed by the product and recently decided to purchase the program again to learn Greek – a language I have wanted to learn since I was a kid.

Rosetta Stone is the world’s #1 language learning software and they’ve also developed an equally amazing social media presence. They have over 2,600,000 Facebook followers, just over 90k Twitter followers and users are so engaged they often start their own discussions. So how do they do it?

They have a good base product
In order to survive in the social media world, you need the goods to back it up. Rosetta Stone’s former chief exec, Tom Adams, said it best in an interview with the Washington Post: “Set out to teach first and change people’s capabilities and then look around at technologies like speech recognition, social networking, casual gaming, all of these different things.”

Like he said, Rosetta Stone’s proven teaching methods are only enhanced by its social media presence.

Brand Consistency
A lot of companies seem to forget their social media is part of their professional appearance. Call me a snob, but if a company’s Facebook page is full of spelling and grammar mistakes, I’m out. The same goes for multiple opinions—even if there are dozens of people contributing, they all need to send out the same message. I don’t mean they all have to regurgitate the company philosophy like a bunch of robots, but they do all have to work toward a common goal.

Rosetta Stone has a set of guidelines that ensures employees are interacting correctly, and that quality standards continue through their social media departments. This might make them sound stuffy, but the result is the exact opposite. Instead of only allowing a single “Customer Success Representative” to speak for the company online, we see other employees engaging in interesting, useful conversations. They come across as well-spoken and professional, but they’re real people.

Social Media is an Extension of Their Product
Rather than simply providing a place where users learn about the product, Rosetta Stone took a social approach to language learning and created an environment where users actually learn the product.

It would be easy for Rosetta Stone to post a “word of the day” and a few grammar tips on Twitter, but that’s not their product, and it’s not engaging. By nature, language is social and Rosetta Stone knows it.

To enhance their education, they’ve created online communities where users chat live with native speakers and interact and play games with other learners. They have a photo booth where you appear in a foreign land and have your photo automatically transferred to Facebook. On Twitter, Rosetta Stone answers questions, offers words of encouragement and even hosts chat sessions that ease students’ nerves. On Facebook, users discuss everything from technical issues to language suggestions to who’s studying what and why.

Last week on their Facebook page, they posted a picture of an orange square and asked their audience, “how would you describe this colour in the language you’re learning?” At the time of writing, the question had 96 responses in a vast array of languages. This is a perfect example of how Rosetta Stone uses their social media presence to not only engage their audience, but supply the community support to language learners to fall back on.

They Write Back to You
It might sound simple, but Rosetta Stone actually responds to comments, both good and bad. And they’re speedy. One guy posted a negative experience, and within the day Rosetta Stone sent him a private message and he publicly posted how the issue was resolved.
Rosetta Stone even actively participates in a Facebook discussion devoted entirely to “What don’t you like about Rosetta Stone.”

Although accepting and taking responsibility is something Rosetta Stone does very, very well, they don’t take over conversations. A lot of people have mixed feelings about buying the program, but rather than pushing their product, Rosetta Stone lets other customers take the lead. More often than not, a simple recommendation squashes all doubts.

In response to Rosetta Stone’s “What time is it in the country whose language you’re learning” questions, a user asked all Rosetta Stone Employees: “What language are you learning and why?” Almost 15 employees responded, all with personal, human answers that made me want to be their friend. If that’s not social media engagement, then I don’t know what is.

10 Reasons People Prefer Facebook to Twitter

Here at Stikky we like to use any kind of Social Media tool we can get our hands on and we encourage our clients and friends to do so as well. But we have run in to a lot of people comparing the two heaviest hitters in the game right now. Here is our list of the "10 Reasons People Prefer Facebook to Twitter".