Making Time for Social Media Marketing

Finding your voice on social media and content marketing outlets takes a bit of work. You need to know what you will be blogging/tweeting/talking about on your topic. You also need to pick which outlets you will use (Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.). The timing is the most important thing to consider, though, since we are all busy all the time.

The demands for each outlet you choose are different. They each have different audiences and they each have different times of day, days of the week, and months of the year that are appropriate for your product or service. Which ones you pick depend on your:

1. Product or service
2. Time you can devote to the other members of your community
3. What they are interested in now
4. How they like to get that information
5. Why they like to get that information on the particular outlet.

Time Management

How much time you can devote depends on what you are selling or promoting. If the product you sell (or service you provide) is complex, then the time investment will be greater than for a simpler item.
How do you time your content campaign?

Plan a few micro posts or tweets and note how much time it took to prepare each. One thing I like to use for this is Google’s Alert service. The alerts turn up interesting items that have been talked about in the past few days or hours (or week) and can be prompts for your own contributions on the subject.

Use the time data you noted and make an estimate for a schedule. You’ll see from the data how long you need to get to the point when you actually tweet or post. The sum product of this exercise is that you’ll have an idea of how long you will need to devote to your marketing campaign.

Set aside an hour or so at the beginning of every day or two to work out your schedule and stick to it. Scheduling time like this makes the process easier in the future as you get into the habits of effective social marketing.

What is your audience reading right now?

The Google Alert’s also show you what others have already written/tweeted or posted elsewhere so you’ll have an idea of what’s been done. Working from those ideas, you can create your own contributions to the global conversation; chipping in with your two pence, in other words.

How does your audience prefer their content?

The sites that generate the content from the alerts also give you an idea of where your audience is and, how they like it. Is it visual? Go to Tumblr or YouTube. Is it text? Go mobile.

Tools to use

One tool I like is HootSuite. It can connect you to FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other outlets easily and all at the same time. Using HootSuite, or TweetDeck, you only need to use one interface to post to multiple sites instead of visiting each one individually.

The time savings with HootSuite don’t end with its interface to different outlets. You can schedule your content for different times of day, and even days in advance, if you want.

My strategy

My own strategy is to take a few hours every few days to write blog posts and schedule them for posting over several days. On the days the posts don’t appear, I spend the same time working through the recent alerts and gleaning interesting ones to comment on or expand on with my own voice. I broadcast the most interesting posts through Twitter and use the rest as ideas for posts and longer comments on GooglePlus or FaceBook.

It’s a simple way to manage a social media and content marketing editorial calendar. By using your collected postings on various sites, you can get an idea of how and when the most popular of your content is being used by others.

6 Tips for Reusing Your Own Writing

These six ideas for re-using your own writing in a different forum are some that I’ve developed over the years. They can be applied to others’ writing, too, as long as they are applied sensibly and responsibly.

1. Read the article. It makes sense to start with an article that has a knowledgeable person's background for inspiration. If the article doesn't appeal to you in the first place, why read it? You will also get an idea of how to start rephrasing and re-organizing the material.

2. Rephrase and use different words. When you have an idea of what the article is about, you can start shifting words around to suit yourself and apply your own style.

3. Change your grammar use. Changing the grammar of the article will sometimes improve it; especially if you have your own grammar checkers turned on. I always check for existing mistakes and differences from your chosen level of formality. I use two different checkers, each using different standards.

4. Change tenses. By making a section of an article take on a different tense, you change the focus of the reader's attention. When you fix this mistake, the article becomes more cohesive and flows better.

5. Re-organize. Try shifting the article's paragraphs around. This changes the structure to make it more logical or understandable. A writer communicates the overall story better by placing historical events in their proper time lines.

6. Check the article's uniqueness. Run the piece through articlechecker.com which passes it through Google and Yahoo. This process should, but not always, find similar articles and perhaps more ideas for the article if you need to bulk it up some more.

The important thing to remember is that there is no copyright on ideas or facts. Check the facts before you check anything else. It is important for a well-written, responsible, and accounted-for article writer to be accurate. Just make sure you present the main idea in a different manner than it was in the original article.

NPM

© 2012 N. P. Maling — Zen Content & Social Marketing Management

3 Tools to Check Your Writing

Image via Wikipedia

A blogger I am familiar with recently claimed that some of his writing was ripped off by a “splogger.” A couple of academics on the East Coast recently traded barbs about plagiarism by one of them. Is this a serious problem on the Internet, copyright and plagiarism? Or, is it just a matter of whose words are whose? I cannot really recall the specific source of the thought, but someone said once that writing is just the alphabet mixed up; or some such thing. 

The blogger, I am afraid, may have cried wolf; but since there are no details …. The academics seemed to be concerned more with ideas, and who said what first, than with anything else. The concept of “idea plagiarism” is weird. Some people seem to think ideas are as unique to people as their fingerprints. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U. S. Copyright Office has a Copyright Basics document available, which explicitly states that: “ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration” are not copyrightable. (Copyright Basics, p. 3) It is best to leave it to a judicial court to decide what copyright infringement is. 

If you care about the uniqueness of your writing, however, there are a number of web-applications that can help you decide whether you are plagiarizing or copying someone else’s words. I will briefly look at a few of them here. 

The Writing Checker Tools 

The first one, which I have used extensively, is CopyScape. It has a very simple submission process to find out whether your writing, or someone else’s, is duplicated on the web. I tried it again, recently, with a couple of pages of my older writing. The samples I chose use direct quotes from another page, so I expected some hits. The CopyScape search did not find those other pages, however, since they have been taken down. 

The second tool, DocCop, is a more in-depth search tool. It can compare files as well as submitted text to existing web pages. I ran the same samples as web checks, but it also did not find any significant matches. 

The third tool, PlagiarismChecker, is similar to DocCop and CopyScape, but limits the input to a short string of text. It also does not check files, like DocCop does. The results, as expected, were nil. 

Comments about the Tools 

DocCop’s search found a number of common phrases from one of my samples in other pages. “most people do not know how to access the best,” and “and satisfactory service to clients may be just as important as credentials.” These strings can hardly be said to be plagiarism, though since they are generic “satisfactory service,” “most people,” and sort of like slogans, “access the best.” The latter phrase could be called a non-copyrightable term. Did I plagiarize these other writers? I hardly think so, because in the context of the terms used, the overall subject of the writing was different. Hmmm. 

One consideration with these tools is that they only check publicly available and indexed web content. DocCop uses Microsoft’s Bing, and the others use Google and Yahoo. If a document has not been on the web for very long, or the web indexers have not found it, then it will not be picked up by these tools. Some web sites also limit the web indexers by telling them to ignore certain pages within sites, causing the potential for negative results when in fact there is duplicate content available.

Another consideration with these text checkers is that, like the Google, Yahoo, and Bing web indexers, they cannot understand the context and meaning of what is being checked. I used a plagiarism checker several years ago, that came up with a kindergarten teacher’s class plan as a potential source of my genealogical text. Was that plagiarism, or was it just the mixed up alphabet appearing in a similar sequence? It takes humans to fit those pieces together. As I mentioned earlier, it is best to have a judicial court decide. 

NPM 

© 2012 N. P. Maling – Zen C&S MM