If you’re are a Twitter user you could be in with the chance of winning a €50 voucher for Spiderworking.com.

If your not on Twitter yet what better reason to join!

All you have to do to enter is Tweet @spiderworking with a question about twitter  including  #smq in your tweet.

We will of course answer your question and will collate all our responses in a blog post including links to your Twitter account and Website.

So get tweeting today for a chance to win!

Some cool social media apps to play with:

Listorious a list of lists, a directory of Twitter lists. Search tags to find lists of interest and add your own lists.
and
Addict-o-matic highly addictive fun way to see results from all across the web on one page.  You can customise and share your page.

Each week we are featuring one of the Work The Web workshops here on our blog.

This weeks featured workshop is ‘Blogging For Business’

Who is this workshop for?

Small to medium sized business owners who own a website but feel that they are not maximising it to it’s full potential. Paricipants should already have a basic knowledge of Social Media.

What you will learn:

Where & When:

We are running this one day workshop on:

Thursday 13th May at The Maudlins House Hotel, Naas, Co. Kildare

and

Friday 28th May at at Jury’s Inn, Custom House Quay, Dublin 1

A limited number of Early Bird tickets are available for €95

Full price tickets cost €145

Payment Details

If you wish to pay by Visa or Mastercard please simple pay online when booking your tickets. If you wish to pay by Laser or if you prefer to pay by Visa/Mastercard over the phone please call 091 399 939 and tell the receptionist that you wish to pay by credit card. To pay by cheque or EFT please contact Ruairi on 091 399 939 for details.

Another big question this week.

Bernard Goldbatch asked

When I introduce mature students to social media, they ask for health warnings. I’d like to read your thoughts on careful engagement online.

This is a good question and one we should all consider before engaging.

If you are embarking on a social media campaign to promote your business it is important to remember that this is ‘Social’ media, simply broadcasting rarely works, you must be willing to become a part of the conversation, to encourage people to actively engage with your brand.  This can be quite a scary prospect, by allowing people to participate you are to a certain extent outsourcing the building of your brand.  You cannot have complete control of how your audience promotes your business, for this reason I think it is important to spend time in advance of launching your campaign assessing your target market and deciding exactly what sort of message you want to send out via social networks. It is always worth consulting with your marketing department (if you have one) to make sure that your social media strategy fits with the overall marketing strategy for your business.  Social media should be part of your marketing mix not separate from it.

I would suggest that you ask yourself 3 questions before you start a campaign, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter or any other online network.

• Who is your target market?  Once you have considered this you can keep your posts on message.  For example, Spiderworking.com targets micro & small to medium enterprises so we tweet links and information that we believe will benefit this audience.

• How personal do you want to be?  Although engagement and conversation is an important part of social media I believe it’s important to keep business pages business orientated.  The level of your personality that you want to allow into your Tweets and posts should be decided in advance.

• How will you react if someone attacks your brand?  Although we all hope this will not happen to us, engagement through social media means that there is always the potential that a disgruntled customer could voice their complaints online.  This doesn’t happen because you use social media, this happens because your customers do.  The good news is that because you are already using social media you can react swiftly to rectify the situation.  Having a plan on how you will deal with complaints, even if you never need to implement it is very important.

If you have a social media question that you would like us to tackle, leave a comment below.

Hootsuite is a great tool for managing your social media. This week’s video blog shows you how to integrate your Twitter lists into your Hootsuite Dashboard and how to create a search column to keep on top of the latest tweets in your area of interest.

Each week we are featuring one of the Work The Web workshops here on our blog.

This weeks featured workshop is ‘Blogging For Business’

Who is this workshop for?

Small to medium sized business owners who own a website but feel that they are not maximising it to it’s full potential.

What you will learn:

If you would like to start a blog for business but aren’t sure where to start, we can show you how to do it from the ground up. We will show you everything you need to know in order to set up a blog easily and quickly and to maximise both SEO and branding potential.

• Choosing hosting and domain name

• Wordpress vs Blogger

• Creating your blog online

• Configuring basic blog settings

• Changing the look of your blog

• Creating your first post

• Formatting and editing posts

• Using hyperlinks

• Embedding video and images

• Managing comments

• Tags, Keywords, and SEO

• Case studies – Blogs that work

• Setting a blogging schedule

• Different types of blogs

• Targeting your market

• What to write

• Goals and calls to action

Where & When:

We are running this one day workshop on:

Friday 7th May at at Jury’s Inn, Dublin 1

and

Thursday 27th May at The Maudlins House Hotel, Naas, Co. Kildare

A limited number of Early Bird tickets are available for €95

Full price tickets cost €145

Payment Details

If you wish to pay by Visa or Mastercard please simple pay online when booking your tickets. If you wish to pay by Laser or if you prefer to pay by Visa/Mastercard over the phone please call 091 399 939 and tell the receptionist that you wish to pay by credit card. To pay by cheque or EFT please contact Ruairi on 091 399 939 for details.

I’ve been asking for your social media question small or large and this weeks one is a biggy!

John Abbot from Abbot Consulting asked:

“would you agree with Gartner’s predictions about Facebook becoming the hub for social network integation by 2012.”

Lets have a closer look at what Gartner predicted:

“By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization. Through Facebook Connect and other similar mechanisms, Facebook will support and take a leading role in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web. As Facebook continues to grow and outnumber other social networks, this interoperability will become critical to the success and survival of other social networks, communication channels and media sites.”

There is no doubt that by 2012 Facebook will have continued it’s massive growth, maybe even reaching a billion users worldwide.  However there is a danger that more users may result in less interaction with the site.  It is possible that with so many friends to keep up with that users will be overwhelmed with the information coming in.  There is also the danger that people will begin to feel that Facebook is too commercial, they will become fans of too many pages and find their news feeds full of marketing messages.  For this reason it is important that page owners keep their posts interesting and relevant to their target audience.

Certainly Facebook are aware of the possible downside of growth and have been quite innovative in the way that they allow their content to be shared.  Facebook Connect for example and the opening up of Facebook chat that puts them in strong competiton with other IM solutions.  Mobile apps such as ‘Urban Spoon‘ will make the way we interact with our facebook friends very different and it is this move forward, creating a Facebook Profile allowing you to easily share experiences across both the mobile and standard internet, that could give Facebook the ability to become the ‘hub’ Gartner predicts.

In some ways Google Buzz is already attempting to make use of your Google profile in a similar way.  By buying into several platforms such as YouTube and Blogger and by allowing you to syndicate these to your email contacts using Buzz there is the potential for Google to become stiff competition to become the ‘hub’ in the future.  Whether Buzz succeeds as a social network will not be clear for quite some time.  It may even be beyond 2012 before we see it take off in the way Twitter and Facebook has, but I would imagine that Facebook will be keeping a close eye on it’s progress in order to stay one step ahead.

]]> http://spiderworking.com/blog/2010/02/24/your-social-media-questions-answered-will-facebook-become-the-hub-for-social-network-integation/feed/ 2 http://spiderworking.com/blog/2010/02/19/creating-twitter-lists/ http://spiderworking.com/blog/2010/02/19/creating-twitter-lists/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:30:39 +0000 admin http://spiderworking.com/blog/?p=272

Twitter lists mean that you never need miss a tweet from a group of friends again. If you use twitter on the web lists are the perfect way to categorise your followers and keep an eye on the tweeters you don’t want to miss.

This tutorial shows you how to make a Twitter list and suggests possible uses for them.

Each week we are going to feature one of the Work The Web workshops here on our blog.

The first one is ‘Social Media For Business’

Who is this workshop for?

Small to medium sized business owners who own a website but feel that they are not maximising it to it’s full potential.

This workshop will provide you with the skills required to market your brand online and increase traffic to your website using social media.

This is a complete introduction to Social Media for business focusing on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube.

What you will learn:

• Case studies on the different ways businesses are using social media.
• How to set up pages, groups, and events.
• How to populate your pages.
• How to attract fans and followers.
• Key strategies for each network.
• How to syndicate your blog or RSS feed across each network.
• Top tips to remember about each network.

Where & When

We are running this one day workshop on:

Thursday 6th May at The Maudlins House Hotel, Naas, Co. Kildare

and

Friday 21st May at Jury’s Inn, Dublin 1

A limited number of Early Bird tickets are available for €95

Full price tickets cost €145

Payment Details

If you wish to pay by Visa or Mastercard please simple pay online when booking your tickets. If you wish to pay by Laser or if you prefer to pay by Visa/Mastercard over the phone please call 091 399 939 and tell the receptionist that you wish to pay by credit card. To pay by cheque or EFT please contact Ruairi on 091 399 939 for details.

We were asked by Lorna from Garrendenny Lane Interiors:

“Wondering about the effectiveness of forming a group on Facebook – how do I invite people -is it friends or fans or both? “

Facebook groups are a good way to create a bit of a buzz around your industry.  A business should always have a ‘Page’ first but a group is a good way to add value to your brand.  They can be a great place for people with a similar interest to share information.  For example, it might be worth Lorna starting a group about interior design in Ireland, that way she could keep on top of the current sentiment attached to her industry, share information, start discussions on particular trends all whilst gathering a group of people together who would have an interest in her brand and what she has to offer.

Mashable published a great article on the difference between Groups and Pages recently.

There a couple of things you should consider when you are setting up a group:

• They have a very short shelf life – group pages do not update members news feeds the way that Pages and Profiles do so it can be easy for people to forget about them.
• They are connected to your personal profile.  Members of the group will know it is you that is administering the group, unlike a page which appears as an entity on it’s own.

The advantages are:

• You can message members directly.  From a business page it is only possible to  send ‘updates’ which often remain unread in a fan’s inbox.  From a page you can send a message which appears in the inbox the way a personal message does.  Be aware not to overload your group members with messages though, use this feature sparingly to avoid people leaving your group.
• If your business already has a page and you are running a new initiative it can be a way to gather together those with a specific interest in it, rather than overloading your fans news feeds with the same message.  For example, Spiderworking.com just launched it’s Work The Web Workshops.  Imagining that a number of the poeple interested in the workshops would already be fans of Spiderworking.com we decided against setting up a business page. Spiderworking.com’s page will be promoting Work The Web and clogging up fans news feeds with the same recurring message could result in loosing them.  For this reason we set up a group.  It also means that we will be able to message directly those interested in the workshops.
• People may be more inclined to join a group because they know that a group cannot pollute their news feed.

Inviting people to join a group

You can invite your ‘friends’ directly to join your new group.  You cannot invite ‘fans’ of your business page directly but can post details of the group on your wall and ask them to join.

If you have a social media question that you would like answered no matter how large or small  leave a comment on this post or tweet us @spiderworking.