Learning Social Media

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is the art and science of making your site easy to find online through search engines such as Yahoo and Google. A site with poorly executed SEO will be difficult to find, which leads to a massive decrease in traffic or perhaps the traffic never existing to begin with. There are a lot of factors at play, including keyword choice, the speed of your site, proper page layout and compliant XHTML, alt tags for images and all sorts of other things. This isn’t purely social media, but if your voice can’t be found, then you can’t be heard.

Figuring out “where to start” with your SEO can be really complicated, and it can be difficult at first to measure if what you’ve done is generally the right thing. For this I recommend using a simple SEO analysis tool like our friends over at Hubspot make. They have a freely usable product called Website Grader (in addition to a suite of other similar tools like Twitter Grader, Press Release Grader, and the new Facebook Grader).

Website Grader will look at your website and give you a “score” from which you can hope to improve on. It then gives a detailed and long list of things that it recommends that you do in order to increase the optimization on your site. It doesn’t try to overload you with every SEO trick in the book, but gets you started on the basics. If you have a low score (out of 100), then you likely need to Google around for some resources (Hubspot provides some tips) and get to work on filling in the blanks. Working on your SEO is a good time to reach out on Twitter to more technical friends should you hit any roadblocks.

Once you get a score in the mid 90’s on Grader, I’d say its time to move onto bigger and more advanced subjects. I should warn that there is a huge amount of bad SEO advice online, companies trying to extract as much money as possible from you, and just tasteless techniques that might get you ranked high but you will lose loyal readers. One good source that I might recommend is a book from O’Reilly Media called Website Optimization. It provides a solid foundation for improving the SEO and SEM of your website.

I wish I could take credit for this, or have produced something as in-depth but today I saw @mayhemstudios post a tweet with this great guide to setting up Wordpress. It’s Part I, so presumably there will be a continuation in Part II. This is a great step-by step guide for getting up and running. Check it out.

Twitter has an interesting learning and adoption curve. One of the first things to try to figure out is, “What in the world do I say on here?” Here are 10 things for you to do on Twitter that will hopefully kickstart the process.

1. Say what you’re doing. Maybe its a once in a lifetime even. example
2. Share a photo or set of photos. example
3. Share a recent blog post of yours, or better yet of a friend. example
4. Launch a new product and listen to the conversation around it.
5. Ask a question, and you might just get a fix or answer.
6. Promote an event that you’re attending to find other people going.
7. ReTweet (RT) a Tweet for someone else to spread the message to your network as well as theirs. If you are hoping for someone to retweet a message of yours say, “Please RT:”
8. Share a link to a cool new piece of technology.
9. Tell people how you’re feeling about something. Support comes from the most unlikely places.
10. Use Search to keep an eye on what people are saying about you and your friends.

There you go! These are still very basic intro tips. In the next few days we are going to move into some more advanced concepts and topics of social media.

Getting started with blogging is quick, painless and easy. I personally recommend using Wordpress, as it is mature, well supported and open source software. The software itself is free, and Automatic even offers free hosting at Wordpress.com. There are also other great options like Tumblr and Google’s Blogger. Luckily, moving between platforms and software is possible and fairly easy, so you don’t have to worry about getting stuck on one you don’t like.

You have two main options: Using the free hosting at Wordpress.com, or hosting it on your own server. For getting started, I recommend using Wordpress.com’s hosting. It has a few limitations, such as a limited set of plugins that you can enable, but is the best way to jump in and get running with minimal technical effort. In the future, we’ll cover how to set up Wordpress on your own server. If you are going to skip ahead a few chapters, and enjoy using linux then I recommend using Slicehost for your hosting.

You can get started with a hosted Wordpress installation in less than five minutes.

1. Go to Wordpress.com and register for an account.
2. Start blogging.

Sorry there’s not more steps, but you’ll almost instantly have YOURSITE.wordpress.com available. It really is that easy. Later we’ll cover setting up the Wordpress with your own domain name and get into the details of effective blogging.

The Cluetrain Manifesto written in 1999 by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, is a set of 95 thesis as a call to action for businesses and people acting in the connected marketplace we have today. It has been cited as a document that’s helped bring many people and businesses into understanding the mentality, mindset, and reality of the market that we live in today and how we should interact in that marketplace.

I’m not going to write more on it, asides to say that to enter this space you should read this text. Read it before you read any more of this website. It isn’t long or difficult to understand. Better yet, if you’d like you can read it online for free. If you’d prefer dead-tree version, they are available at Amazon.

Twitter is a microblogging platform used by millions worldwide to communicate public messages. Messages are constrained to 140 characters, and mostly public. In addition to putting information out to Twitter, you can use it as a research resource to search and keep an eye on what people are saying about you or things you care about. Overall you can do a lot with Twitter, but what you need to do today is sign up. Here’s a short video thanks to Common Craft:

Tasks for Today:

1. Sign up for Twitter.
2. Fill out user profile completely, including adding a photo.
3. Use Twitter’s built-in tool to search through your inbox and find people that you have connected with in the past that are on Twitter. Chances are, there’s someone. “Follow” them. Follow @tibbon to follow me.
4. Put out three Tweets (messages on Twitter). In the first, just say “Hi” and what you’re interested in. In the second, ask a short question as to something that you’ve been trying to figure out. In the third Tweet, tell us what you’re looking forward to in the next week (upcoming movie, job interview, or an event).
5. Search for something you care about on Twitter. Maybe look up a company, a band, recent news, or something you’ve bought recently. See how much conversation there is out there?

Tomorrow and in the future:

• Send out at least one Tweet per day.
• Check out TwitScoop to see what everyone’s talking about.
• Use search to see if people are mentioning you.
• Follow people that follow you. Avoid following spammers.
• Don’t follow too many people. Once you follow more than 100 people, then following more than 10% than follow you looks bad and is a faux pas.
• Look at what others are doing an emulate them. This is a great environment to learn by example.

There’s a lot more to Twitter than just this, but these are things to do today and I will be covering more in the future. If you’re craving information today, Rebecca Corliss at Hubspot has put together an excellent free eBook on Twitter that covers it in-depth.

My name is David Fisher, and welcome to Learning Social Media. You may have read my blog, WhatIsNoise. Soon at Learning Social Media you will find daily tips, techniques and ideas that will help you expand your social media presence and online brand. Concepts presented will be small, cheap/inexpensive and immediately actionable items that you can put to use today. You will find few in-depth, high level and conceptual topics that will take you months to implement. To find things like that, go and visit my friend Chris Brogan and you will become enlightened. This site isn’t here for enlightenment. It’s about gettting results today. Think of it like a workout. Every day there will be new exercises, but you must continue to work on the old exercises as well for optimal results.

Let’s get started.