Want to know what people are saying about you when you’re not there to hear it? This article will teach you how you can use Social Listening to never miss an opportunity to improve your online sentiment.

Do you remember the adage about your ears burning?

Back in Roman times, it was firmly believed that if you had a ringing or “burning” in your ears, then someone was talking about you.

They also went so far as to say that if your right ear was ringing, that meant someone was saying good things about you. Conversely, if your left ear was ringing, they were saying not-so-good things about you.

Wouldn’t it be great if those were true though? Even better–wouldn’t it be great to have some sort of Superman-like hearing ability so you can actually hear what people were saying?

Luckily, technology has given us the equivalent of Superman’s super hearing via the concept known as Social Listening.

What is Social Listening?

Social Listening is the act of using sophisticated software to monitor the entire internet for people talking about you, your brand, or keywords related to you.

People are talking about you online. And in many cases, you may not even know it’s happening.

These conversations are happening on popular social networks, online forums, blog posts, in online videos, and the list goes on.

If you’re a brand or a business, understanding public sentiment–how people feel about you–is critical. Whether it’s good or bad sentiment, you want to know about it.

In most cases, you would hope that those talking about you on social media have used a “tag” or “@mention” feature so that you get a notification. Sadly, the vast majority of conversation happening around your brand isn’t tagged.

If someone is talking about you on social media but hasn’t tagged you, they either:

• Didn’t know your brand was on that social channel
• Don’t understand how to tag you on that social channel
• Don’t have the ability to tag you on that social channel
• Don’t want you to know they’re talking about you (perhaps because they’re not saying positive things)

The good news is there are a handful of tools out there that will notify you every single time your brand (or keywords related to your brand) are mentioned online.

This is known as Social Listening, and it can turn into a powerful online marketing tool for your brand.

Ultimately, this is not just about knowing every time someone mentions your name. It’s about gathering actionable data from your target audience; data you can use to:

• Determine where your audience spends their time
• Uncover pain points that your audience has
• Discover what the sentiment around your brand is
• Learn what kinds of things spark passion in your audience
• Understand how to best market yourself to your audience

If you’re not leveraging Social Listening in these ways, you’re missing out on countless opportunities to serve your audience better, and grow your business.

Not only can social listening be used for collecting information about your brand and audience, but you can also use it to keep tabs on your competitors.

You can monitor what your competitors are doing, and how their audience is responding. This can give you just the competitive edge you were looking for.

The Best Social Listening Tools

Below, I’m going to give you some of the most powerful social listening tools to help you monitor your online presence more effectively.

These are tools I’ve tried, tested, and have proven to be both effective and easy to use whether you’re a beginner or an advanced marketer.

Are there other tools not listed below? Of course. But I only want to give you the best options I’ve found. This saves you the pain of having to sort through dozens of not-as-great solutions.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is the probably the easiest way to get started with social listening. It helps you monitor keywords or phrases across Google’s index (basically the entire internet).

Every time Google indexes content that contains one of your monitored keywords, this tool directly send an alert directly to your E-mail.

Setting it up is easy. All you need to do is to follow these steps:

Step 1: Go to Google Alerts and log in with your Google account.

Step 2: Type in your brand name (as a starting point), but don’t click “Create Alert” yet.

Step 3: Click on “Show Options” to get a drop-down list. Here, you can find the following:

• How Often – How often would you like to get alerts
• Sources – You can leave it set at “Automatic” if you want to get all possible sources, but there are several choices for it if you are into something specific, like news, blogs, videos, etc.
• Language – Limit your alerts to a specific language.
• Region – Limit your results to specific geographical locations.
• How Many – Control if you only want to get alerted for the popular or “Best results,” or if you want all results of mentions shown.
• Deliver to – The E-mail you want to get alerts at.

Step 4: Next, click “Create Alert.”

Google Alerts might not be the most powerful tool out there, but it is simple and free. It is a perfect go-to place when are just starting out with social listening.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent research tool with a multitude of purposes which include content research, trend analysis, competitor analysis, influencer research, and monitoring.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to be focusing on BuzzSumo’s “Alerts” a.k.a. their Monitoring feature. What I really love about it is that it gives you the ability to monitor six categories of things:

• Brand Mentions: track your brand name and know whenever it’s mentioned online.
• Competitor Mentions: track your competitor’s brand name whenever they’re mentioned online.
• Content from a Website: track every time a certain website publishes a new article.
• Keyword Mentions: track specific keywords or phrases and know whenever they are mentioned online.
• Backlinks: track every time a specific website gets a backlink.
• An Author: track every time a specific author publishes something online.

To create one of these alerts in Buzzsumo, login and click on the Monitoring tab.

From this dashboard, you can click on the “Create New Alert” button in the top-left of the screen.

Then you’ll want to choose which category you want to create an alert for.

Each category is going to have different options you can configure to refine your results and when you get alerts when something new is found. This makes it very easy to monitor exactly what you want and get the best results.

Now, because of how powerful BuzzSumo is, it’s not a free tool. Getting access to BuzzSumo starts at $99/month. For serious marketers, though, it’s well worth the cost.

However, thanks to my friends over at BuzzSumo, you can give it a try for free using the link below.

Try BuzzSumo Free!

3. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is my favorite social media management tool. It’s also a powerful social listening tool.

When you connect a social profile in Agorapulse, it will automatically begin monitoring mentions of your account name or handle. So for example, every time someone uses my Twitter handle, it will show up in the “Inbox” section for that profile.

The same goes for my Facebook page–if someone mentions my Facebook page by tagging it in a post, then it shows up in the Inbox for that profile.

Now, you’ll also notice there’s a “Listening” tab in the Agorapulse dashboard for each profile. This is where the real social listening happens.

You can create “Searches” to monitor for Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube profiles. So unlike BuzzSumo where it’s monitoring everything on the internet, these are specific to the channel in which you’re setting up the alert, or as they call it, Search.

For Facebook profiles or pages, your Listening tab will only be untagged mentions of your profile name. Unfortunately, you cannot create custom searches for these channels.

Now what really sets Agorapulse apart here is that you can reply to these messages right from within the inbox.

For me, the Twitter Listening is what I find to be incredibly helpful.

Many people share my articles, and a lot of times they forget (or don’t know) to tag my Twitter profile. But thanks to Agorapulse, I can set up a search for my domain name, and every time a link is shared to my domain, it will show up in my Listening tab.

When I see that someone has tweeted a link to one of my articles, I can thank them by typing into the Reply box.

Now, let’s walk through how to set up a custom Search in Agorapulse for a Twitter or YouTube profile…

First, you’ll click on the Settings icon for the profile you want to create a Search for.

Once there, click on the Listening tab and then click the Create a new search button.

You’ll then fill out all the fields that you’re given:

• “Name”: Give your search a name so that you can identify it from other’s that you may create later.
• “Search for…”: Enter the keyword, phrase, or Twitter handle you’re wanting to monitor.
• “Ignore these…”: You can include words that you want to eliminate from potential results–words that would give you results that you don’t want to see.
• “Save users to Fans and Followers:” Checking this box will automatically save any user whos content matched this search to your “Fans and Followers” tab, allowing you to keep track of those who mention you.
• “Language”: If you want to limit your searches to a specific language, you can use this setting to do so.
• “Location”: You can also limit your searches geographically if you like (great for local businesses).

Agorapulse also has some useful advanced search operators that you can use to create more intelligent queries.

Setting up a custom search for Instagram is slightly different. When you go to create a new search for an Instagram profile, you’ll see some slightly different options.

You can currently choose to monitor Hashtags or Locations. Select the one you want to monitor, and then enter the search term to create it.

Now, both Facebook and Instagram are changing rapidly at the moment, and it’s unsure how their APIs will be changing in the near future regarding 3rd party apps. So use these features while you can!

4. Brand24

Brand24 is similar to BuzzSumo in that it scours the entire internet looking for your monitored keywords. Unlike BuzzSumo, however, it will also monitor online video! It also provides analysis and reports based on the frequency and sentiment of those keyword mentions.

One of the more interesting features is the ability to create an infographic of your mentions:

Setting up a keyword to monitor in Brand24 is easy. Items you are monitoring are called “Projects” and can include multiple keywords and variations.

First, log in to your dashboard and click on the green Add new project button in the middle section or on the green “+” next to the Projects label in the sidebar.

Now, you can take the easy way, or the advanced way of creating a Project.

The easy way is just to type in your keyword, hit the “Next” button, and select the language you want the mentions to be in.

Or, you can click on the “More settings” link below the “Next” button, and get more advanced settings to really refine your mentions.

The first thing you’ll see when you click the advanced options is the Keywords tab. Here you can name your Project, select the necessary/required/excluded keywords, and select your language.

Next, you can click on the Sources tab if you want to exclude any sources where your mentions will be coming from.

Next, you can head to the Notifications tab where you set up rules that will notify you once your project has reached a certain number of mentions or based on a set frequency. Notifications can be set up for mobile (via the mobile app) or to an email address.

And, finally, the Reports tab allows you to automate reports to be delivered to you via email on a daily or weekly basis.

You also have the option to be notified of “Storms” which is what they call a higher-than-normal volume of mentions in a short period of time. This is helpful in the case that your brand is going viral (for better or worse).

One last note I’ll make about Brand24 is the ability to filter mentions by Sentiment and Influencer Score. This feature is extremely helpful for doing customer support or influencer outreach.

5. Mention.com

Mention is among the most popular online tools used to monitor your company’s name, phrases or keywords related to your niche, and also to track your competitors in real time.

Just like BuzzSumo and Brand24, Mention crawls the entire internet looking for instances of the keyword(s) you’re monitoring. However, Mention allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram accounts and actually respond to alerts right from within the dashboard (just like Agorapulse).

Another thing that really stands out about Mention is that they also monitor Radio and Television mentions. This feature is only available at the enterprise level, however, and they don’t even give a set price for this level of monitoring.

The user interface is beautiful and easy to navigate. Creating a new Alert is very straight-forward and easy.

To create a new social listening alert, click on the Create New Alert button.

A new screen will pop up, and you can select what it is you want to monitor: Company/Product, Competitor, or Anything Else.

Selecting Company or Competitor will give you a screen that allows you to type in the name. Once you start typing it will try to autocomplete what you’re looking for. If you see the brand or competitor you’re looking for, click on it.

Now, you have the option of just clicking the Next button, but I recommend clicking the advanced settings link.

This will give you the ability to refine the rules of the alert, exactly like Brand24 does. Once you’ve filled those fields out, click the Next button.

Here you can identify the brand website, Twitter profile, and Facebook page. Once you’ve done that, click the Next step button again, and you’re off to the final screen.

This last step is to select which sources you want Mention to monitor, and in which languages. Once you’ve set those, you can hit View Results and start monitoring your alerts.

Plans start at only $29/month, but that doesn’t get you much. To get Analytics and Influencer features, you’ll need to get the $99/month plan. At that point, either Brand24 or BuzzSumo is the far better investment, IMO.

Social Listening is Awesome, Right?

Once you begin playing around with social listening, you’ll start to get more ideas about how you can leverage.

Social listening is a fantastic way of engaging with your target audience, discovering conversations around your brand, providing customer support, and keeping an eye on the competition.

The tools listed above are the best ones I’ve found, but I’d love to hear if you’ve used any other social listening tools in the comments below. As a brief recap:

1. Google Alerts – Easy for beginners, free to use, and the most basic social listening tool available.
2. BuzzSumo – Great for monitoring multiple categories of online mentions, powerful alerts, and reporting, starts at $99/month.
3. Agorapulse – Beautiful UX/UI, easy to set-up, and perfect if you are heavily focusing on social media. Starts at $49/month.
4. Brand24 – Powerful listening, sentiment analysis, influencer scoring, smart filtering, reporting, and more starting at $49/month.
5. Mention – Great social listening tool but the most useful features come with a hefty price tag. Plans starting at $29/month, but only the $99/month plan brings real value.

If you want to have a firm grasp on how your brand is doing online, social listening tools are crucial.

Have you tried social listening before? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Have you been struggling with how to use Twitter effectively for your personal brand or business? If so, this post has everything covered for you, start to finish.

Twitter is the epitome of the KISS strategy—keep it simple, stupid.

Not that I’m labeling anyone “stupid,” but the social network does rather successfully force its users to do what most of the internet doesn’t: self-edit.

With only 280 characters (yes, including spaces), you don’t have much liberty to hash out long-verse prose.

I mean, sure, 280 characters is a leg up from its previous 140. And yes, now that Twitter has released a threaded tweets feature it’s easier to create a series of connected posts.

But it still calls for users to think which points are pertinent, ponder syntax, and condense it all in one tweet.

And with the social site boasting of 335 million monthly active users by Q2 2018, it would be remiss of your brand to pass over Twitter.

Don’t know how to use Twitter? Feel like you’ve been underutilizing it?

I’ve got you.

Whether you’re establishing your personal brand, promoting your company or organization, or just wanting to not look like a n00b tweeter, I believe you can benefit from incorporating the following best practices and be a step ahead of the average Twitter user.

I’m going to break it down into three levels: Basics, Intermediate, and Advanced.

Let’s get started.

How to Use Twitter Level 1: The Basics

Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, and this is where your journey in the Twitter-sphere begins:

Decode The Jargon

It’s absolutely insane how language quickly evolves, especially in the interwebs. RTs, hashtags, QRTs… These terms are not just part of millennial parlance. These are real things that you need to be aware of when you use the website:

Tweet – This is what they call your posts on Twitter. This word can be used as either a noun or a verb.

Feed – This is where you see a stream of tweets from the accounts you follow. It’s mostly chronological with a bit of Twitter adding in things that you might find interesting that have been tweeted at an earlier time.

Avatar – Another name for your “profile picture.” The ideal size for this is 1000px by 1000px.

Header image – The photo that shows up at the top of your profile. The ideal size for your header image is 1500px by 500px.

Follow – Basically, subscribing to someone’s tweets. When you follow someone, you will now see their tweets in your Feed. Unlike Facebook “friending” the other person does not need to approve or follow you back in return. This is one of the things that made Twitter so distinct in the beginning (before Facebook copied the feature).

At-mention – An ‘at-mention’ is performed by placing the ‘@’ symbol in front of a person’s username. This signifies that you are speaking to or quoting the person designated after the ‘@’ symbol. When you do this, the user who is being named receives a notification that they have been ‘mentioned’.

Retweet – The Retweet is a way of sharing another user’s (or your own) tweet into your stream. It’s the twitter version of quoting someone or resharing their post. This feature has gone through a few iterations since the social site started. Previously, to share someone else’s tweet, you need to type ‘RT’ then at-mention the user, like so:

Quote of the day! RT @DustinWStout: Negative people are like dogs: they love rummaging through garbage and sniffing each other's rear ends.

— Rebekah Radice (@RebekahRadice) October 13, 2014

But now that they’ve made it a standard feature, a tweet that is retweeted will just look like every other tweet in the Feed. The difference is that if you’re not following the person who originally tweet it, you will see which of the people you’re following retweeted it, which is why you’re seeing it in your feed.

Quote Tweet (a.k.a. retweet with comment) – From the old-fashioned way of using RTs, we now have QRTs. Instead of copying a tweet and then manually adding ‘RT’ before it, you can just use the Quote Tweet function, also available at the bottom of each tweet. This gives you a bit more room to add your own tweet in conjunction with the one you just quoted.

https://twitter.com/kyleFirethought/status/1029162158830092290

Notice how you can see my original tweet below Kyle’s amazing comment in response to my tweet. Like a Tweet within a tweet. #tweetception

DM – Short for Direct Message, this feature allows you to start having private conversations with a user or a group of users (provided that they allow it in their account settings).

Like – Hitting the heart button under each tweet. You have a ‘Likes’ tab on your profile where you can see all the tweets you’ve liked before.

Hashtag – The pound/number sign (#) used to be a keyboard character on old Nokia brick phones used to capitalize letters. Fast forward to Twitter, the # sign became ‘hashtag’ and is now used as a way to group similar topics together and make it easier for users to follow them. More on how to use hashtags properly in the content section.

Now that you can decode Twitter-speak, here’s what you need to do next.

Say My Name

It’s no longer the 1990’s, where people used random strings of obscure words and numbers to create their online alias. Nowadays it’s best to just use your name.

Friends, family, fans, or potential clients will be looking for your name. Don’t make it hard for them to find you.

Sure, you could debate how useful a “brand name” can be, but if you’re a person on social media as a person then use your person name.

Don’t Be An Egghead

An accurate depiction of Twitter no0bs… and trolls.

While Twitter no longer gives brand new users a default “Egg” profile picture, the impression of a no-photo account is pretty much the same.

There is no better way to broadcast the fact that you are a n00b than to have a default profile picture. This is Twitter’s default image when the user hasn’t uploaded their own profile photo yet.

You wouldn’t want to be mistaken for an illegitimate business or a troll, right? So, please, go and get an image of yourself. Even if it’s just something that vaguely represents or resembles you, make it your profile picture.

Whip out your phone and take a good selfie. You can also use your logo if you like. It doesn’t have to be a professionally done photo. You’re not auditioning for a feature film here. You just need something there that represents you.

Bio the Way…

Optimizing your profile doesn’t stop at photos. Your Twitter bio is an important piece of making a first impression.

People will go read your bio. So make sure to fill it out with relevant information that:

1. Tells people what you’re passionate about (ie. what you’ll likely be tweeting about when they follow you)
2. Gives them a way to identify with you (ie. coffee lover, gamer, vegan… some interest that your audience could share with you)
3. Includes a relevant hashtag or three (but no more than three–let’s not be obnoxious, okay?)

Humor works best on Twitter, so try to make your bio at least slightly entertaining. In fact, 78% of all Twitter users consider themselves to be the funniest person they know.

(I’m kidding, this is not true… but maybe not too far from the truth?)

Spam Is Only Good When It’s Food

Seriously.

I don’t care how much I love you if you are tweeting five times per minute and my entire Twitter stream is consumed by your tweets, no matter how inspiring or profound, I will likely unfollow you.

If you are bombarding someone’s news feed with your banter, it will only be a matter of time before they either tune you out or flat out remove you.

You have been warned.

Know which type of content to send out and the ideal time to tweet them, so you can keep your followers from dropping the ax on your profile.

Use a social media scheduling tool to save yourself time, and spread out your tweets if you prefer to write tweets in bulk.

Keep it Short(er) And Sweet(er)

Even though Twitter increased the limit to 280 characters, sometimes, it’s not enough especially when sharing links.

Yes, Twitter now automatically truncates URLs, but there are still a great number of benefits to your business if you decide to shorten your links using third-party apps. I talked about those here.

So what are these link-shortening services available online that you can use for free?

When you want to share a link to a website, blog, YouTube video, or the like, always use a link-shortening service like bit.ly, is.gd, or tiny.cc. That way, you will have more room to share what the link is about and you’ll look like you know what you’re doing.

There’s actually a lot you can do with short URLs, so take some time and learn to use them right.

No One Likes A Snob

When someone mentions you, respond. It’s that simple.

If you want to monologue, theater is the place for you; not Twitter. Social media is called “social” media because you need to socialize.

If all you plan on doing is broadcasting your message and not engaging with your audience, you should just do us a favor, stay off of Twitter.

Even if you rack up thousands of followers, they won’t convert to paying customers if they feel like there’s a robot running your Twitter account (wait… is there?!).

The only legit reason to not be replying to all your mentions is when you’ve joined the big leagues and you already have millions of followers and simply cannot keep up with all the mentions.

Follower count is just a number. As a budding brand on Twitter, engagement is key to winning.

If your customers tweet a complaint about your business, respond ASAP. And I mean go fast-and-furious all over that. Studies actually show that 42% of consumers who complain on social media expect a response within 60 minutes. So, chop chop!

Recommended tool: Agorapulse can make sure you never miss a mention and give you one central inbox to gather all your social profile mentions, comments, and replies.

Don’t Be The Party Pooper

Come on, don’t be that guy.

Spoiling the end of each episode of Game of Thrones right after they air does not make you a star journalist. Remember, your audience followed you because they want to stay updated with your business; not to have someone rain on their parade.

If you truly must do it (for some unfathomable reason), be considerate and add a #SPOILERALERT tag at the beginning. Trust me, some people take their TV shows very seriously, and if you ruin the surprise it’s as if you’ve kicked their puppy or something.

There’s A Special Place In Hell For Plagiarists

This runs true anywhere on the internet, not just social media.

Whether it’s a blog post or a funny tweet or an inspirational quote, don’t copy and paste.

For one, the Retweet and the Quote Tweet buttons exist; use them.

Secondly, the original author may track you down and raise a huge ruckus over the plagiarized tweet.

And third, it’s just not cool, especially in the context of building a brand around your business. You wouldn’t want to lay the foundation of your online presence on a stolen tweet, right?

Avoid The Boring and The Banal

Your followers—who are probably your current and future customers—do not want to know when you’re using the restroom, tying your shoe, or taking out your garbage. Unless of course it’s got some sort of entertainment value.

A little personal touch on your tweets is great, as this will humanize your account more. But don’t go overboard.

Want to know the kind of content that they’ll engage with? Keep reading this guide.

The Grass Is Greener On The Other Side… When You Think It Is

Don’t get jealous because someone’s numbers are higher than yours. A large number of followers doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

There are various ways to measure your success via the social sphere, but follower count isn’t one of them.

You also need to look at, among others, engagement rate, and conversions (leads or actual sales). Metrics also vary depending on the kind of campaign you’re running.

As far as retweets go, if you’re not getting as many as you would like, just write better tweets!

Don’t let the green-eyed monster rear its ugly head. As my buddy Brian Fanzo says, you do you.

How to Use Twitter Level 2: Intermediate Level

Once you’ve got the basics down, it’s time for you to step up and begin to strategize a bit. This section is where we separate the casual Twitter users from the marketers.

You’re going to learn to step back and think through some strategy and tactical application for your brand or business to thrive.

Eyes On The Prize

In war, you can’t go in blindly. You need to know your mission and how you’re going to achieve it.

Same goes for marketing. Define your goals (your mission) and your objectives (how you’re going to achieve it).

To set goals and objectives, use the SMART framework—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

You can achieve a wide variety of goals on Twitter, some of which include increasing brand awareness, driving more website traffic, generating leads, or even generating sales.

So, let’s say, you’re a startup owner.

It’s logical that you’d want to increase brand awareness in 6 months’ time, right? Get the word out about you, let people know who you are…

With that goal in mind, you can’t just say: I want to be as huge as Lady Gaga on Twitter!

While I applaud you for your ambition, you’re only being vaguely specific (be as huge as Lady Gaga). Other than that, you’re missing almost all of the five characteristics of a SMART goal.

Now, if we follow the SMART framework, you can then say: I will grow my Twitter following by 25 new followers per week.

It’s specific (25 new followers), measurable (follower count), attainable (you’re not aiming for millions immediately), relevant (more followers mean more people will hear about your biz), and timely (per week).

While it’s a far cry from Gaga’s 76 million followers, you’ve set a goal that your business will be able to realistically achieve.

And you also have successfully set your first metric to measure! Your follower count.

You should also look into increasing engagement rate, as well as how many of those followers went to your website (measure clicks with short URLs), purchased (track conversions in Google Analytics), or signed up to your email newsletter (also conversions in Google Analytics).

Who Are You Talking To?

In every marketing campaign, the key is knowing who your target audience is.

Think about it: You can’t post maternity articles if your target audience consists of 60-year-old males who are about to retire. Likewise, a marketing manager would be more interested in SEO strategies than Justin Timberlake’s newest tour date.

Well, maybe there’s a few marketing managers who are Justin Timberlake fans (like me), but I digress.

You get the point.

Know who you are talking to. Create a customer persona (if you haven’t yet), and really get in their heads.

Use Twitter’s Audience Insights and find out the demographic profile of your typical followers like buying style, gender, and interests.

As Kurt Vonnegut once said,

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

And no one likes pneumonia, trust me.

A Little Competition Doesn’t Hurt

There’s nothing wrong with finding out who your competitors are and how their social accounts are faring. There’s everything wrong if you start curling up into a ball of self-hate because XYZ company has 10 more followers than you. (You remember what we talked about in Section 1 about follower envy, right?)

Competitive analysis is, as this Entrepreneur article puts it,

“Identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own product or service.”

That said, look at the following:

• Who they are, the services/products they offer, and what’s unique about them
• How often they post and how much their followers respond to them
• How do they promote their brand
• Do they have weaknesses like terrible customer service or atrocious grammar (I mean, you’re-your, amirite?)

During the process, it’s going to be so easy to have your biases show and create a narrative in your head that your competitor is probably gaming the system. That, or they have more money than you.

Set those biases aside and really look at what they are doing right.

But—and here’s a huge but—do not duplicate them. What works for them may not work for you. You can use them as inspiration, but it all boils down to strategies that will work for you and your target market.

Twitter Lists are Your Friend

For both monitoring your key audience members or keeping track of competitors, you need to be utilizing Twitter Lists.

Since I’ve already done a deep dive on Twitter Lists I won’t spend time on it here. Just read that article, and start using lists ASAP.

Tap Into Your Inner Automaton

It’s relatively easy to reply to a DM or a mention, but once your account blows up, you need to be able to scale.

Luckily, there are plenty of social media tools available that you can use, to make sure that you can handle the job once you start gaining followers.

I made a reference earlier in this article to my article on social media management tools. Take a look and pick which one would work for you best.

Create Compelling Content

You’ve got plenty of room to be creative and compelling even with 280 characters. Believe me, I constantly do it.

What’s “www” short for? Think about it for a second… Answer: Nothing. “Double-u double-u double-u” is 9 syllables. “World Wide Web” is 3 syllables. 🤯🤯 (via @BradUpton1’s standup special on @VidAngel — so good!)

— Dustin W. Stout (@DustinWStout) July 21, 2018

Just keep your target market in mind and post content that’s relevant to them. Here are a few ideas:

• Ride the latest trend in your industry and post something helpful to your audience (e.g. your opinions, how to adapt to an upcoming trend, etc.)
• Share your website blog posts (or blog posts from other publishers that you find valuable)
• Use videos, since 79% of consumers prefer this medium over text and 84% of them have made a purchase after watching a brand’s video
• Post creative images to catch your followers’ eyes
• Use GIFs when applicable, especially since 100 million GIFs are all the rage right now
• You can also start a Twitter chat by using a shared hashtag and discussing industry trends and news
• Try live streaming video as it’s a growing area within the social media sphere
• Supplement your status updates with ads so you can reach more people

If you’re still having a hard time coming up with compelling content ideas, my team and I can help. Just drop us a line.

A couple of things that can especially drive up engagement at this point in your Twitter life are polls and hashtags.

Take advantage of the Twitter Poll function so you can ask for product/customer service feedback or your followers’ opinions about your brand.

Twitter Poll about Polls. How do you feel about the “Polls” feature here on Twitter? #ThisIsSoMeta

— Dustin W. Stout (@DustinWStout) August 14, 2018

This gives them a platform to let you know what they think, and you, in turn, get to have a better grasp of how your followers behave. It’s a win-win!

Next, use hashtags properly. Before it became a cultural phenomenon, it was added at the end of a tweet to give conversational context. That has changed today.

This is the most misunderstood and misused communicative device in the Twitterverse (haha– another piece of Twitter terminology that I’ve subtly worked in).

A hashtag is like an at-mention but instead of indicating a person, it indicates a context for what the tweet is about. It lends the tweet to a greater conversation happening around that subject.

“Whatever it is you fear, you are compensating for it in your leadership.” – @AndyStanley #CatWest

— Catalyst (@CatalystLeader) April 6, 2011

In the example above, the author (CatalystLeader) was quoting AndyStanley and they wanted to signify that it was a quote from the event #CatWest (which is short for Catalyst West). This is the most common practice for hashtags, though it’s not limited to events.

A hashtag is simply a way of giving a context to what is being said.

Hashtags are often seen amongst Twitter’s Trending Topics (a list of the most tweeted words or phrases– just gave you another bonus term! Bam!).

Although today people use hashtags more whimsically, and sometimes carelessly, they’re still a pillar of strategic Twitter marketing.

How to Use Twitter Level 3: Advanced Level

Still there?

Great! We’re almost to the end.

Last but definitely not the least—you need to monitor your campaigns and measure the results.

After all, what good is a strategic marketing plan if you can’t tell whether it’s working or not?

How’s Your Performance?

Plenty of things can go wrong if you don’t monitor the performance if your campaigns. I mean, people could be hating your posts right now and blocking you!

So to find out if you’re doing well, do the following:

• Monitor your keywords – Using social listening tools such as Agorapulse can help you track when people mention your brand without actually at-mentioning you.
• Track ad conversions – If you invested in ads, use Twitter Analytics Conversion Tracking so you can see if any of them reached your actual audience. Also, see if they went to your site, purchased, or downloaded a lead gen tool. You’re investing in ads, might as well lead them to somewhere that can generate you revenue!
• Find the right time for posting – Nailing down the right time for posting on Twitter is tricky. A huge part of this is location, especially if you cater to a global audience. Use the social media tools I wrote about so you can schedule when to post your tweets.

Keep a keen eye on these metrics so that you can identify trends and make adjustments to your strategy as needed.

Record The Results

Measuring your results would allow you to see if you’re going the right track or if you need to pivot immediately. But be sure you’re also recording them for long-term analysis.

Twitter analytics will be instrumental in doing this (so get in there if you haven’t already!), but you can also use Google Analytics especially if you’re using social media to drive traffic to your website.

Are your tweets aligned with what your users want? Under the Audience tab on Twitter Analytics, look at the Demographics, Interests, Mobile Footprint, and Consumer Behavior.

Say, your audience is interested in sports. If that aligns with your business, it’s simple: go tweet something about it.

Are they engaging with you? Like I said way up top of this guide, engagement is key especially for a budding Twitter brand.

Look at which of your posts get the most retweets, replies, or likes. Find the trend among those and replicate the successful ones. Then, evaluate your engagement rate over time.

Are you reaching your audience? On Twitter analytics, you can see this in the Home tab. Look at the growth in impressions, profile visits, and organic mentions.

Are your followers converting? Click on the Conversion tracking tab to see if your tweets are driving people to action. With the help of website tags, you can track click-throughs and other data to better pinpoint audience behavior. Use this in conjunction with your Google Analytics to determine if your CTAs need improving.

Play around with Twitter Analytics; you’ll find the numbers surprising at times, but always enlightening. The idea here is to go deep with the data and analyze how else you can improve your campaign.

Prepare for Crisis

Lastly, and I hope this won’t happen to you, but PR disasters do happen.

Remember when singer Susan Boyle tweeted a promo for her album by using the hashtag #susanalbumparty? Yikes.

How about when DiGiorno Pizza tried riding the #WhyIStayed trend and failed miserably?

What I’m saying here is to also have a crisis communication plan in place, especially in the age of social media where screenshots immortalize mistakes and the backlash is swift.

You’ve Got This!

And there you have it! A crash course in this weird, enigmatic world that is the Twitterverse! Congratulations, you made it through!

Was this helpful in any way, or was it just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo? What are some other questions you have that I haven’t answered? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

[Featured image via Travel man, Shutterstock.]

Twitter lists can be a powerful networking tool if you know how to use them. Before we get into that though, let’s start with an analogy.

If you were invited to the biggest cocktail party in the world, what would you spend the majority of your time doing?

Would you be shouting out the headlines to your latest blog posts? Walking up to random people telling them to check out your press release? Opening up your wallet and showing off your favorite cat GIFs?

I’ll tell you what, that last bit would actually be impressive— you have a working GIF (pronounced with a soft g) in your wallet?!

I digress.

Twitter, to me, is like a giant cocktail party. Lots of people, everyone buzzing (must be the cocktails), and people are making connections. Well, some people are.

The smart business people are exchanging information, getting to know others, and making connections. Are you using Twitter in this way?

Well, I believe that Twitter lists will allow you to supercharge your networking and connecting with the people who matter most to your business. So take and apply these following tips about Twitter lists and watch your network grow!

What are Twitter Lists?

Firstly, Twitter lists are a simple (albeit a little clunky) way of grouping people together on Twitter. You can create up to 1,000 lists for your account containing no more than 5,000 people each.

You can access your lists from your desktop by clicking on your profile picture in the top left corner of Twitter and selecting Lists.

On mobile, you will need to visit your profile and click on your gear icon.

Once you are on your lists page you can select a list and view a stream of tweets from only people on that list, you can see a list of the list members, or see a list of the list subscribers. More on subscribers in a minute.

How to Create a List

To create a list from your Lists page click on the Create new list button on the right of the screen.

You can then name your list and give it a description.

You can also decide on the privacy level of your list. It will be Public by default but if you wish it to be Private simply select Private and then Save list.

From mobile, you can create a new list from your Lists page by clicking on the + symbol in the top right corner.

Using Twitter Lists to Grow Your Network

To make effective use of Twitter lists, you must understand a couple fundamental things about Public lists:

• When you add someone to a Public list, they will get a notification.
• People can subscribe to your Public lists.

And it’s these two things that we’re going to take advantage of to make the most of Twitter Lists.

Why do these things matter?

Well, the fact that people can get a notification about you adding them to a list will actually lead some people to just follow you right away. Or maybe they check out your profile first, and then follow you after seeing what awesome things you tweet about.

Now, this isn’t just about growing your follower count, it’s about connecting with the right audience. Always remember that.

Without further ado, here are the best ways to use Twitter Lists to supercharge your networking.

1. Target Market List

Create a list of high-profile Twitter users who are in your target market. These should be potential clients or customers who would be highly valuable to you.

You can find these people using simple market research and social listening.

Don’t name the list “Target Market” though— that’s tacky. And you want this to be a public list, so you don’t want people getting a notification when they’ve been added to a “target” list. Instead, name it something like “Interesting Tweeters” or “People worth following”. Something that will compliment the people on it.

2. Influencer List

Create a public list of people who are influential in your niche or a subject/topic that relates to your business. This is the type of list where you can name it accordingly— something like “Influencers” or “Influential Tweeters”.

Who doesn’t love being added to a list like that?

3. Brand Advocates

This is probably your most valuable list. Create this as a list of those people who are actively advocating for you on Twitter. This would be people who are sharing links to your website, speaking highly of your brand or frequently engaging with your profile.

Pay very special attention to these people. This is where having a list really helps you to grow your relationship with the people who are already fans of what you’re doing.

Visit this list frequently and interact with these people. Brand advocates can be worth their weight in gold.

If you’re running your own Twitter chat, you may want to create a list specifically with those who attend them regularly.

4. Team Members

It might be worthwhile to create a list of employees or team members. This way, you can easily check in on each other’s tweets and provide a simple way for other users to find your employees.

This might be one type of list you want to keep private.

5. Industry News Sources

If there are any trusted industry news sources that you follow on Twitter, it may be best to create a list of them. This way you can easily navigate to that list and ensure you don’t miss anything in your home feed.

This will likely be valuable to those who follow you if they are interested in the same industry, so be sure to make this one public as well.

6. Competitors

Now here’s another list you would want to keep private. This is a great way to keep an eye on your competition and see what they’re doing on Twitter.

Visit this list every now and then, checking in on what your competition is doing. See what’s working and what is not. Then go do better!

7. Replace Your Home Feed

Since there is sometimes a stigma about following etiquette on Twitter that remains unsaid, you may find yourself following a lot of people who you don’t actually need to follow. This creates a lot of clutter in your Twitter home stream.

If that is the case, you may want to create a private “Home” list that contains the people who you’re actually interested in following.

How to Automate Twitter Lists for Huge Visibility Boosts

How would you like to be able to automate getting discovered by your target audience?

What if there was a single trick you could use to connect with highly targeted people on Twitter, and it was completely auto-pilot?

After trying it, one of my email subscribers told me that their followers grew by 21% in a single month!

Now, this tactic could be seen by some to be a little bit ”spammy” so please use with caution.

However, if done right, and with the best intentions, you can see a huge increase in:

• Profile visibility
• Overall impressions
• Follower growth

And this is all on autopilot.

Now, the caveat here is it’s going to cost you. There used to be a way to do this for free using an IFTTT recipe. However, that functionality has since been removed from IFTTT.

Luckily Zapier still has the ability to perform this automated operation, if you are willing to pay for their premium plans.

What this automation does is essentially this:

Search Twitter for a specific search term or phrase, and then add all the users who tweeted that search term/phrase to a Twitter list of your choice.

Now, how do we set this up?

Step 1: Create a Public Twitter List

First, create a list inside Twitter. This is relatively easy to do, just head over to your profile picture in the top-right corner of your screen (on desktop) and click it. Listed on that drop-down list will be ”Lists”. (That sentence was way more meta than I intended it to be.)

Once you’re on your Lists page, you will see a button that says ”Create new list”.

Give your list a name—a name that when someone sees that they’ve been added to they will not be weirded out. Think of something complimentary, something you would be proud to see that someone has added you to.

But also make sure it’s relevant to the kind of people you’re looking to add to it.

For example, I called mine Interesting Tweeters because I’m definitely interested in them if they’re in my target audience.

You’ll also want to give your list a description for the people who will be checking it out. Keep it simple, and complimentary.

Also, make sure that you mark your list as “Public” so that when someone is added to that list, they will be notified as such. Also, this means that other people can “follow” your list, adding value to their own Twitter experience.

Once you’ve created the Public list, it’s time to head over to Zapier.

Step 2: Signup for Zapier

You all are fully capable of signing up for a new thing, so I don’t need to hold your hand through this.

Simply go to Zapier and grab yourself a free account. You’ll have 14 days to try all their premium options for free, so this would be a perfect trial period to see how well this tactic works for you.

Step 3: Create Your First Zap

Now, here’s where we get into the nitty-gritty of creating this Twitter lists automation. I’m going to walk you through creating a Zap specifically for automatically finding and adding relevant users to a Twitter list.

So, for example, if I knew that @GaryVee’s audience is similar to the audience I’m targeting, I could just search for anyone who is retweeting him. I would then build a Zap that looks like this:

• Trigger: Search Twitter for phrase, ”RT @GaryVee”
• Action: Add user to my Twitter list, Social Tweeters

So how do we do that?

When logged in, click on the orange Make a zap button at the top of the screen.

Then you’ll want to search for Twitter in the list of triggers if it’s not visible right away.

Select Twitter from the list, and you’ll be given a set of possible Twitter-related triggers that Zapier is capable of. Choose the very first one, Search Mention and then click the Save + Continue button at the bottom.

Next, you’ll need to connect and/or select the Twitter account you want to use for this trigger. If you haven’t already connected an account, click the Connect an Account button and follow the prompts.

Once you have connected your account, select it and click Save + Continue.

All you need to do now is enter the search query you want to use to find your relevant users. In my example above, I used RT @GaryVee because his audience is similar to mine.

Just choose something that you think your target audience is tweeting often enough to get a decent number of results.

You’ll now be able to test what kind of result your search query came up with. Simply click ”view your mention”, and you can see the data from the result, just to make sure it worked to your liking.

If you’re satisfied, click Continue to move to the next step.

Now it’s time to tell Zapier what to do with this data once it finds it. So we’re going to tell it to add the user who tweeted that search query to our list.

Just like before, select Twitter from the list of available apps. Once selected, you can then choose the ”Add User to List” action, then click Save + Continue.

Again, choose your Twitter account from the list.

Once you’ve done that, you can then choose the list that you want to add people to.

The last step is to tell Zapier where to get the username of the person to add to the list. This seems a bit strange to have to do (because it seems obvious you want to add the user who tweeted), but you need to do it nonetheless to ensure it works.

Once you’ve selected the username, click the Continue button.

As before, you can test to make sure this is working properly. Or you can just click Skip Test & Continue.

You then have one more Continue button to click, and then all you have to do is give your Zap a name and turn it on!

Once you’re finished with that, you can return to your Zapier dashboard. Your Twitter list automation is all set!

Word of Caution

What I’ve discovered, the hard way, is that this type of zap will count as a Zapier task every time it adds someone to a list. In my case, this resulted in over 3,650 tasks in less than 24hrs.

Since I was only on the Starter plan, this exceeded my monthly Task quota, and all my zaps stopped working. So if you have a search query that you want to use for list add automation, be aware that you’ll probably need a higher plan level to keep it going for longer than a day.

Fortune is in the Follow-Through

Once it’s active, don’t just forget about this list. You’ll want to check in on it and see what types of content is being produced by this group. Make it a routine.

Then, when appropriate, engage with these people. If your targeting has worked, you’ll likely find some great people to connect with.

You will also notice that some people begin to thank you for adding them to the list. The reason for this (in case you’re not aware) is that when a user is added to a public list on Twitter, they get a notification about it. That’s why it’s important that you make your lists public.

People will see you’ve added them to a list— this is the biggest part of the automated discovery. These highly targeted people will be discovering your profile thanks to the notification they receive.

Immediately follow anyone who responds to your adding them to the list. They’re paying attention, and they’re engaged. Those are the kinds of people you want to connect with.

Final Word

Twitter is a powerful tool, but like all social networks, it only works if you spend time building relationships. Nobody is going to magically find you and start retweeting, favoriting, and replying to everything you have to say.

If you build the right relationships, strategically, you can make it a very profitable network. Managing your relationships in such a way on any social network, you can see significant results.

So go take action, and let me know how it works out for you!

An extensive Pinterest guide specifically for bloggers who want to drive traffic and grow their reach.

Pinterest, for those who don’t know, is a bookmarking and content sharing website that is capable of delivering massive referral traffic to your blog. It is a place where people save, share, and search for content that they’re interested in, just like most social networks.

And, no, it’s not just for women, guys.

However, Pinterest refuses to call itself a “social network” for a few reasons. Although it can technically be considered social media, the content on Pinterest serves a slightly different purpose than most other social media sites.

But we’ll get into that a little later.

Several phrases have been used to describe Pinterest. Some of these descriptions include “image bookmarking site” and “virtual pinboard”. Although Pinterest has been around since 2009, it wasn’t until 2013 when it became hugely popular.

And it was at that point it became a traffic referral machine.

Today, Pinterest has approximately 200 Million Monthly Active Users (MAU). It may seem small compared to the likes of Facebook or Instagram, but the traffic referral potential is incredible.

In this post I’m going to teach you, dear blogger:

• How people use Pinterest
• How to boost your traffic with Pinterest
• How to grow your reach with engaging Pinterest content

So saddle up, and get ready to get a crash-course in being awesome on Pinterest.

How and why do people use Pinterest?

There are many reasons people use Pinterest. If you want more traffic from Pinterest then, you should start by knowing why users are there in the first place.

While Pinterest has had the reputation of being a female-dominant network with more than 70% of its users being female, it’s important to know that the active number of male users is growing fast.

But it’s not just about the user demographics—who’s using it—I find it more interesting to talk about what people are using it for. This is known as user intent.

So let’s talk about user intent. Why are people on Pinterest? And how are they using it?

Internet Bookmarker

Similar to Delicious, Pinterest enables its users to save and store links from the web. However, Pinterest is much more appealing due to its visual nature.

Both men and women are using Pinterest to “bookmark” things that interest them from around the web such as:

• Cooking recipes
• Workout routines
• DIY tutorials
• Motivational quotes
• Fashion trends
• Products they want to buy

Did you catch that last one? It’s probably the most important to those of us who own online businesses and sell products and services.

Out of all the social media platforms, Pinterest users tend to have the highest ratio of “purchase intent” when using the platform.

Users can also group their pins into what they call “boards” which are simply a way of categorizing the pins they save.

For example, if I found a great new social media infographic, I would pin it to my “Social Media Infographics” board. Or if I found a nice new office desk I would pin it to my “Office Ideas” board.

Much like a museum curator hand-picks items of interest and places them into grouped “exhibits,” Pinterest users curate their boards so they can always come back and search through them at a later time.

People use Pinterest to connect with friends

Pinterest is a visual-based website that allows people to express themselves and connect with friends and family members. People with similar interests strengthen their relationship by interacting through re-pins, likes and comments.

Some people (my wife, for example) register for a Pinterest account for the simple reason that their friends are also using it. They aim to contribute to their friends’ conversation when they are discussing their new Pinterest ideas.

One thing that fosters this level of community is Group Boards. When you create a board, you also can invite people to contribute to that board as well.

This will be something we come back to in the “how to grow your traffic” section.

To promote their online businesses

Many entrepreneurs who are running both small and large retail businesses utilize Pinterest to promote their brand, products, or services. They focus on creating amazing visuals to attract their potential customers thus consequently increasing their online exposure.

The more people view their content, the more likely they are to purchase or recommend the business, product, or service.

Some entrepreneurs also join Pinterest simply because their competitors are on Pinterest and they don’t want to fall behind.

How bloggers can boost Pinterest traffic

For bloggers, growing your Pinterest traffic can open a floodgate of opportunities to capture a wider audience. To be successful, you need to employ appropriate Pinterest marketing strategies to increase your traffic.

Below are the best tactics I’ve found for growing my various blogs and website properties over the years.

Start with a strategic mindset

From the very beginning, ensure that your Pinterest account is going to provide relevant information to your audience. Anything you pin should fall under at least one of the following categories or “types” of Pins:

• Useful
• Helpful
• Insightful
• Engaging

These four types cover the fundamental traits of content that people consume and, more importantly, share online.

Pin this!

Examples of Useful Pins

Creating useful content on Pinterest for your audience means things such as:

• [abc] checklist
• [xyz] chart
• [123] quick tips

Anything that is a bite-sized visual that is immediately useful to the audience is what you’re looking for. If they can look at the pin, apply it to something in their life, and get a positive result of some kind, that’s a winner.

Take the following pin for example:

This pin is useful because it gives you an instantly actionable thing to do—a workout! So if a user is on the lookout for a good ab routine, they would see this and immediately pin it somewhere that they could find it later when they want to work out.

Super useful, right?

Another example would be something like this:

This pin is a quick reference guide to popular social media cover photos.

Examples of Helpful Pins

A helpful pin is something that answers a question, fixes a problem, or provides some sort of assistance to the audience. Things such as:

• How to [xyz]…
• What kind of [abc] should you…
• DIY [lmnop]

There are plenty of great examples of this on Pinterest because users are in love with do-it-yourself (DIY) pins. In fact, DIY is one of the highest-interest categories (along with recipes) on Pinterest.

Here’s an example of a helpful pin from my friend Alisa Meredith:

For anyone wondering ”What are some things I can do to improve my Pinterest marketing?” this pin provides an incredibly simple and effective answer.

Now, helpful pins don’t always have to be all-inclusive like the useful pins I described above. A helpful pin may just be a link to an article that helps a user do something—kind of like a “bookmark,” right?

Take this pin for example, which is probably my most popular pin (and article) of all time:

This is simply a link to an article that helps people learn how to make better-looking visual content (like Pins, for example).

Examples of Insightful Pins

Providing a visual that is insightful might take a little more time and thought, but it’s worth it. Things such as infographics are a perfect way to give people insight in a visual way that they’ll want to pin to their own boards.

This is an excellent example of a pin containing insight:

One of my most popular visuals of all time happens to be this type of image, and to this day I’m astonished at how well it’s done despite how simplistic it was.

As you can see, insightful pins can be as complicated or as simple as you want them to be. Just be sure there is a clear value that your audience is getting out of them.

Make your website pin-friendly

Ultimately, the goal of doing well on Pinterest for bloggers is to get people from Pinterest to click through to your blog. If you only rely on your effort to do this, you won’t get very far.

You need to encourage people who are already on your blog to pin your blog posts to their Pinterest boards.

I’ve covered this in depth on my How to Increase Pinterest Traffic by 2,000% post. You’ll want to read that article to get the most detailed look. But, here are the essential points:

• Include a “Pin” button in your sharing buttons
• Create a Pinterest-optimized image for every post (735×1102 pixels is ideal)
• Make sure that your site has enabled Rich Pins

Including a “Pin” button on your blog posts encourages your audience to pin your articles to their boards. They work similar to the share buttons on Twitter or Facebook.

Additionally, Pinterest has a number of website widgets you can build and add to your site which will showcase anything from your profile, specific boards, specific pins, or just allow people to follow you there.

Maximize your visual impact

Since it’s such a visual platform, standing out on Pinterest is not as easy as just throwing together a visual and slapping it on one of your boards.

There are a few things you need to know to get the most return on your visuals.

Size matters… text size that is

Nowadays most people access social media through their mobile phones. This means that they are viewing your pins on small screens.

So, if your text size is tiny, guess what? People won’t be able to read it.

Make sure you’re using a font size that is readable on a small screen.

You don’t want people straining their eyes and deciding not to click through because they couldn’t read it.

Image dimensions matter too

As I noted above, when creating your pins, make use of tall (portrait) images rather than using short (landscape) images. Tall images look much better in the Pinterest interface because of its column-based layout.

Additionally, tall images allow you to add more details to the image itself.

The most widely accepted standard for Pinterest image sizes is 735 pixels wide by 1,102 pixels tall.

But this isn’t necessarily an absolute necessity to get the exact pixel dimensions. The most important thing is that the image is taller than it is wide.

Personally, I now use either a 735×1080 image (as noted in my downloadable social media image templates or a 1080×1920 image so that I can also use it in things such as Instagram Stories.

Color is important

There have been a handful of studies done on the effectiveness of Pins based on color. One of the most well-known Pinterest studies found that:

• Red and Orange are highly effective dominant colors
• Moderate saturation (not too bright) performs best
• Having multiple dominant colors performs better than single dominant colors

These results are likely a result of so many food and recipe images being popular.

Pin this!

One last finding of these studies is that Pins without human faces tend to do better than Pins with human faces. Strange, but that’s the data.

Brand your pins

One of the best things you can do to build your online reputation is to create a recognizable style to your visual content. This is a form of branding.

Pick a consistent font or set of fonts (a.k.a. your typography), choose a set of brand colors to use every time, and add a logo and website address on each Pin image you create.

Branding your pins can be a challenging task, but they are worth the time and effort. As more and more people share your pins with their followers, it will solidify your brand in their minds and grow your authority and recognizability.

A word of caution, however: keep your branding subtle.

Don’t be obnoxious with your logo being so big that it crowds the rest of the content in the visual. Keep it small, and inconspicuous enough that it’s out of the way, but still noticeable.

Get active on Pinterest

If your personal Pinterest account is not attractive and worth following, you’re going to have to just hope that popular pinners find your blog themselves. To help gain some traction on your account, use the following helpful tips.

1. Create your boards. For a start, set up a minimum of 10 boards covering your key topics and keywords.
2. Pin around 5-10 times per day. But of course, ensure that the posts are related to your niche or keywords, so you’re building your accounts authority around them.
3. Repin relevant content from other users. You don’t just have to surf the internet to find pins, search inside Pinterest and find great content to repin!
4. Follow relevant pinners and boards. While you’re searching Pinterest for things to repin, be sure you follow people and boards that are related to your topics and keywords.
5. Cross promote your Pinterest profile. Send an email to your email list, share links to your pins on your other social networks, and use your other marketing channels to feed your Pinterest growth.

And what do you know, I’ve created a pinnacle graphic for you to easily remember the above tips! Aren’t I thoughtful?

Pin this!

Getting active and involved in the community will not only start to gain traction for you, but you’ll start to get a deeper understanding of the culture. And that will lead to even greater success.

Final Thoughts

Pinterest is a relatively untapped and growing source of traffic for bloggers. Understanding how to utilize it to grow your blog will be a powerful tool in your arsenal.

Got any questions about how to use Pinterest for your blog? Let me know in the comments below!

Create a strong personal brand across all your social platforms with this no-nonsense guide.

When people visit your social profile, are they impressed? Does your social media presence look like one cohesive, professional brand?

If you cannot confidently shout “yes” to both of the previous questions, we’re going to fix that.

Having a solid, attractive and professional social media presence can open up countless opportunities. Business, partnerships, employment opportunities and much more.

Heck, I’ve gotten six different job offers over the last two years just because of my social media presence. And I haven’t even been looking for a job since 2012.

It all starts with having a solid personal brand.

The goal here is to make sure your personal brand, across all your social media accounts, is one you can be proud of and will give people the best possible impression.

Hello, My Name Is…

The first thing you need to consider is your name. This might sound like a “no, duh” moment, but it is something you need to be aware of.

Ultimately you want to have the same name across all of your social channels.

Sometimes this is not possible, and that’s not the end of the world. But if you can make this happen, it is the best route because it makes it super easy for people to find you.

Take my social accounts as an example—I’ve managed to nail down dustinwstout across all my most important social networks:

• facebook.com/dustinwstout
• twitter.com/dustinwstout
• pinterest.com/dustinwstout
• instagram.com/dustinwstout
• linkedin.com/in/dustinwstout
• youtube.com/dustinwstout

Now, the only exception here was that I didn’t get to use the “w” in my Google+ profile URL because when I received the custom URL, it was automatically given without the ability to customize it. Because I was one of the first people to get a custom Google+ URL a year before everyone else did, I didn’t argue.

I highly recommend you avoid using pseudonyms or ambiguous numbers.

Cheeky or clever usernames with your birth year at the end were fun in middle school—we’re trying to build a personal brand, though.

So stick to your legal name or some version of it.

If you’ve already started a social media profile with a pseudonym, consider starting a new account if you cannot change it. Trust me; it will be worth it in the end.

Who is Your Daddy, and What Does He Do?

Next, we want to make sure Arnold doesn’t have to interrogate your kids just to find out what you do. Make it clear and easy for him to check your social profile and have all the info he needs.

You only have a small amount of space in which to give people a few key things:

• What you do, or what you care about
• What your personality is like
• How they would benefit from following you

This is not an easy task when you have limited space in which to do it. You will want to make the most of it by keeping it simple and effective.

Just be sure you give those three items above covered in the allotted space you have. If someone is taking the time to read your bio, make sure they’re not left scratching their head afterward.

Semantics, Oh What Fun!

Now, many of you reading this are not SEO people. And that’s fine—neither am I. I leave that to smart people like Mark Traphagen.

So for us non-SEO people, I’ve come up with a simple exercise for identifying what your keywords should be. Answer the following questions in the form of bullet points:

1. What do you do for a living?

2. What are you passionate about?

3. What value do you give to people?

For example, here’s how I would answer those questions:

1. What do you do for a living?
   1. Blogging
   2. Social Media Consulting
   3. Speaking
2. What are you passionate about?
   1. Storytelling
   2. Coffee
   3. Social media
3. What value do you want to give to people?
   1. Better storytelling
   2. Social media education
   3. Entertainment

See, that’s not so hard, is it? Now, by going through that exercise you should have identified a few strong keywords that need to be mentioned in your bio.

Represent Your City

Most social media profiles give you the ability to show where it is you’re located. This might seem scary to some, but you don’t need to give your home address publicly.

Having a general geographic location can help you significantly in getting local opportunities and recognition. Studies have even shown that having well maintained social profiles linked to a local area can boost local search rankings.

So make sure you don’t skip representing your neck of the woods.

This tiny bit of geographic contextualization can help people relate to you more and make you seem like more of a real person.

Because let’s be honest, it’s hard to think of people online as real people. That’s why it’s so much easier to get bent out of shape and berate someone via Twitter than it is when they’re your next door neighbor.

Most Important: Your Digital Home

You’ve heard what the biggest social media mistake is, right? So you already have a home base (website) where you’re sending people to?

Okay, good. Now don’t forget to make sure this is visible in your social media profiles!

You won’t believe how many times I visit someone’s social media profile and one of the following things is happening:

• They haven’t listed a URL
• They’re linking to another social network profile
• They’ve linked a Bitly or other short URL that could be linking to anywhere

Let’s break down why each one of these is a big no-no.

Not Listing a URL

Just do it. If the social network doesn’t provide you with a place to add a URL, add it right into your bio.

On Periscope, for example, they don’t give you a place to link somewhere else, so I’ve just added at the end of my bio.

You have to assume that if you’re doing a good job maintaining a significant social presence that people are going to want to know more about you.

Don’t miss those opportunities. Link your website.

Linking to Another Social Network Profile

If you don’t have a website (did I mention that’s the biggest social media mistake?) and all you have is a primary social network that you want people to connect with you on… well, fine.

I guess that’s all you can do.

But get a freaking website.

If you do have a website and you’re still linking to another social network profile, stop it.

When someone discovers you on a social platform, it’s highly likely that it’s their platform of choice. Don’t give them the impression you’re not as invested in their platform of choice by promoting another.

Using a Bitly Link (or other short URL)

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some short URLs.

However, if you’re using a generic URL shortener for your primary URL for people to see when they first meet you, they’re not going to click it.

It’s too easy for spammers, hackers, and untrustworthy people to shorten a URL through a generic shortener like Bitly or Goo.gl. Too many unsuspecting people have clicked through to somewhere they never wanted to go on these types of links and been burned by it to make it your first impression point.

Just use the full URL you want them to visit. Period.

If someone doesn’t already know, like, and trust you, they’re not clicking on a generic short URL.

The only exception to this is if you’re using a custom branded short URL and it’s clearly a shortened link that you own. I’ve covered how easy this is to do in my previously mentioned post about short URLS.

Say Cheese!

Your profile picture is a crucial part of building trust. So take some time and get a good shot of yourself to use for your profile picture.

It doesn’t need to be a professionally done photograph—you don’t need to book a time to do glamor shots with the local Senior Class Photographer.

Just make sure it passes the following profile picture checklist:

• Make sure we can see your eyes
• Be sure that you’re smiling (or at least not glaring at me like someone peed in your Cheerios)
• Frame your face so it’s not cut off
• Make sure it’s bright enough to differentiate between you and the background

That’s it. That’s all you need for a solid social media profile picture.

Profile Picture Size

To have a good quality profile picture across all your social media profiles, it needs to be a minimum of 500×500.

Now, none of the social networks will display it that big, but you can upload it at that size, and they’ll worry about resizing it.

You don’t have to memorize the exact profile picture size of every different social network. One good 500×500 that you use across all your social platforms is all you need.

The Same Photo?

Yes, I highly encourage you to have the same profile picture across all your social channels.

Why? Because you want people to recognize you instantly.

You don’t want someone who follows you on Twitter look you up on Pinterest and sit there for three minutes wondering if they found the right person.

How am I supposed to know who the real Inigo Montoya is?

Recognizability and good branding go hand-in-hand.

Social Media Cover Photos

Now I’ve already dedicated an entire blog post to social media cover photos which also includes free downloadable templates.

Grab those. They’re always updated with the latest dimensions and recommendations.

One more thing I’ll emphasize here on the topic though is that you should make it less about advertising and more about showcasing your personality.

Think of it as a visual expression of your bio.

Have your social media cover photo represent who you are, what you do, or what you’re passionate about in the form of a photo or graphic. And use as few (if any at all) words as you can.

Let’s Talk Content

When most people hear the phrase “branding yourself on social media”, they may instantly think of visuals, colors, logos and typical things associated with a brand identity.

Branding is not just about looks.

Branding yourself on social media also relates to the type of content you’re sharing.

When someone discovers your profile and begins scrolling through your social posts, are they seeing content that falls in line with the rest of your profile?

Or in other words, if you say in your bio that you’re a pet lover, are there posts in your stream that prove it?

When you went through and found your keywords for your profile, you should also be using this as a guide to the types of things you’re sharing on your social channels.

Sharing things on social media that are consistent with what you want your brand to be known for is the most crucial part, and one people often miss.

Be strategic in what you share so as to be consistent with the brand you’re creating.

Some might argue that this is the most crucial part of the process. If you can’t do this consistently, hire someone who can.

Way to Go!

As long as you are consistent with all the above, you will develop a brand worth following on social media. You will solidify your reputation and people will know, like, and trust you as the authority in your fields.

Time is your friend, but only if you are consistent. Building a solid, trustworthy personal brand doesn’t happen overnight, but it does pay off in many ways.

Are you building a strong brand on Social Media? What network is your focus? Let me know in the comments below.