This Thursday (27th Jan 2011) at 7pm GMT / 2pm ET, I will be live on the Social Media Ireland’s Facebook page chatting and answering your questions about Selling online using social media.

The hour long session is the second time Social Media Ireland has run such an event, at the beginning of January Krishna De was the guest expert talking about Facebook and there was a massive turn out with lots of information and advice changing hands.  If you want to see what went on scroll back on Social Media Ireland’s Facebook page.

As many of you may know I started my business career selling corporate gifts online and much of my marketing activity was based in social media.  Because of this background I will be focusing this chat specifically on Social Media Marketing for selling online.  So if you are an online or offline retailer and want to know more about how to market your business and promote sales through Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc drop in, ask a question or just find out what challenges others face.

To book your seat, RSVP to the event on Facebook and tune in on Thursday to Social Media Ireland’s Facebook page.  I will be collating the most useful stuff into a blog post next week.

Linkedin has just introduced a new way to share links and interesting news stories using the status update function.  This allows you to share links in a similar way that they are shared on Facebook.  Links become far more clickable as you can add a picture.  It’s straightforward to do and should result in more click thrus to the links you post.  It is important to remember though that Linkedin is not Facebook, it is a professional network so be very aware of what you post!

Here’s how to do it:

• Log in to Linkedin and scroll down to your status update box.

• Click ‘link or news’

• Add your link
• Type a comment in the box above
• Click ‘Attach’.  Choose a picture from those on offer

• Choose who you would like to see your update ‘everyone’ or ‘connections’

• Click ‘Share’ and your update will appear.

• You will notice the ‘Share’ button appears underneath your post.  This means that you or others can easily share the content both with groups and with their connections.

It’s important to update your blog on a regular basis.  SEO experts believe that after time search engines will get used to how often the content in your website is updated and will visit accordingly.  So once you have decided how often you are going to blog it’s important to keep to this schedule.

Sometimes however it’s impossible to keep to your blogging schedule, what about when you go on holiday?  If you have a meeting? If you simply don’t have time that day? One of my customers asked me if it was possible to schedule posts for the future.

The good news is that yes you can write your blog posts when you have time and schedule them for later:

• Log in to your wordpress account and click ‘New Post’ on the top right hand side of the screen.

• Create you blog post as usual but instead of clicking ‘Publish’, choose ‘Edit’ next to ‘Publish immediately’ on the line above the publish button.

• Add the date and time that you want the post to publish.

• Click ‘OK’

• Click ‘Schedule’

And that’s it, simple!

Have you ever been to an event and eyed with envy the twitterfeed projected onto a screen displaying tweets using the event’s hashtag?

TwitterFall is a simple web based app which allows you to quickly set up a twitterfeed for your event.  Twitterfeeds are great ways to encourage user interaction at any event both for those attending and those watching on from home or work.

Follow us on Twitter for daily tips and cool links: @spiderworking

This is the last of our series of blog posts answering your social media questions from the recent contest.

Our first question comes from @marketingelves their website is here.

@marketingelves @Spiderworking are there any tools that would allow you to track what’s been said on twitter on a local (Ireland) basis #smq

Twitter have recently introduced geotweeting although not everyone is using it and it’s not 100% accurate.  It does mean that you can use Twitter’s in house ‘advanced search‘ to find local users. You can search by town or country.

Not as accurate but still useful is Tweepsearch, enter: location:”your town” into the search box and it will throw up results based on the information users have added to their profile.

Our last question is from @360Dvirtualtour their website is here.

@360Dvirtualtour @spiderworking can fb adverts target specific locations in ireland or must it be ‘ireland’?

Although Facebook does allow you to target by town in other parts of the world it has yet to introduce this for Ireland.  The official reason from the Facebook site is:

Unfortunately, our targeting capability internationally is still somewhat limited. Cities may not be available in certain countries due to the small number of users in these locations. Cities will be made available as Facebook traffic in the area increases.

If you have a social media question you would like us to answer leave a comment below or tweet it at us (@spiderworking) including ‘#smq’ in the post.

UPDATE 13th May 2010

Facebook now allows you to target individual towns and cities within Ireland with your ads.

These two excellent free web applications allow you to monitor your brand, competitors, industry or any topic online. Simple to use, they search the social web for mentions of any keywords you choose to search for.

Social Meniton: The most comprehensive social media search tool we’ve found that not only throws up results but measures sentiment and other data relating to your key words. It also allows you to download a csv (excel) file so that you can track progress over time.

Who’s Talkin: Not as detailed information but it’s faster to throw up results and allows you to switch quickly between one network to another.

For more video tutorials and social media videos subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been asked by people to blog on a couple of things that are really bugging them.  So here’s the two top offenders:

1. Farmville – How to hide it

A common problem.  Whether it’s Farmville or Fishville, Mafia Wars or whatever the latest craze is it seems to drive people mad. There is however help at hand, hiding these games from your newsfeed without hiding the friends using them is relatively simple:

• Find a post from one of your friends using Farmville on Facebook:

• Hover your mouse over the top right hand side of the post and ‘Hide’ will appear:

• Click ‘Hide’. Facebook will give you the option of hiding the game or hiding the user. Click ‘Hide Farmville’

• Facebook then confirms your action:

And that’s it, Farmville won’t bug you again!

2. Using Facebook Profile Pages for Business

I’ve blogged about this before but the problem seems to be getting worse and it’s really annoying people. Two people have asked me to blog about it in the last week.

This morning I logged onto facebook and this was what my news feed looked like:

Flooding a newsfeed like can prove an annoyance to people and you run the risk of users hiding your profile altogether.  Apart from just being annoying there are other reasons you shouldn’t use a profile page for your business:

1. A Facebook fan page is visible to the whole world, you don’t need to be a Facebook user or logged in to view it. Because of this it is also visible to search engines, giving you inbound links to your website improving your search engine optimisation.
2. Demographics – Facebook offer some great demographics, you can see what age group your fans fall into, whether they are male or female and in what geographical area they live.  This means you can see if you are targeting the right audience with your page.
3. Respect your customers, respect their privacy. By using a personal profile page for business you are asking friends to share personal information with you but all you offer in return is marketing information.  This isn’t a fair exchange and is likely to annoy fans and attach some negative sentiment to your brand.
4. Facebook don’t want you to do it, they could close your profile down loosing you your friends in the process.

If your still not convinced look at this profile page that is promoting a business:

This is space that should be devoted to offering valuable content to your customers and enhancing your brand. Yet on a profile page it’s cluttered with irrelevant information.

So if you value your customers and fans please, please, please change to a business fanpage!

At Spiderworking.com we set up business fanpages for customers, offer training, consultation and even Facebook campaign management.  Get in touch or call us on 01 442 9410 to find out more.

This week we show you two applications that allow you to post short video’s to twitter.

Bubbletweet which posts popping bubble shaped video.

and

YFrog which posts regular video.

This is the second in our series of blog posts answering your twitter questions from the recent contest.

Our first question comes from Jenny from @jattconsulting more info on them here. (site still under construction)

@Spiderworking How do you run a contest or a poll on facebook?

There are a number of ways of running a poll on Facebook.  Which method you use is determined by what sort of results you want.   If you are running the poll for research purposes and you want definite answers to your questions I would recommend using one of the applications that has been designed to run on Facebook Pages.  Probably the best application currently is “Polls” which is not only the best looking application but it also makes it easy for your fans to see the options.

If however your Poll is just for fun, or designed to create more interaction on your page, using phtographs or the Notes Application can attract more users.  One of my favorite Irish Facebook pages Hairy Baby runs polls using Photos on a regular basis. They load a picture or a series of pictures and use the description box to ask the question.

We recently ran a poll on our own page using the notes application and again found it a good way to encourage interaction.  Because we weren’t limiting our responses to specific answers we discovered options we hadn’t considered in the original poll.

@EJQ of Eilis J Quinlan & Co. asked:

@Spiderworking. How do you UN -follow someone???

Unfollowing someone is simple.

If you know the username of the twitter user you want to unfollow go to http://www.twitter.com/useryouwanttounfollow – Make sure you are logged into twitter.

On the right hand side of their page you will see a cog symbol:

Choose “unfollow” from the drop down menu.

We’ll be answering more of your Twitter questions next week.

If you like cool social media tools don’t forget to become a fan of Spiderworking.com on Facebook where every Monday we showcase one of our favourite apps.

This week Amanda from Spiderworking.com demonstrates a cool web app for videobloggers. Trying to remember what it is you wanted to say can be a challenge when you are a video blogger. Easypromptor is a autocue / telepromptor device that you can use on your own computer.

If you like cool social media tools become a fan of Spiderworking.com on Facebook where we help blow the Monday Blues away with a weekly “Monday Morning Cool Tool”.