Tag Archives: social media tips

social networking

Using Social Media to Increase Your Value

By Amanda Smyth Connorwinecomputer

Are you offering your clients a full suite of services, or are you waiting for them to hand you the assignment?

Don’t miss an opportunity for an upsell!

For every assignment that you undertake, whether it be writing copy, or creating blog strategies, or working on an SEO and linking plan, you should always be thinking of ways to upsell yourself and your services, and the number one upsell to consider is “how can I tie this project into social media?”

A well thought out social media strategy is money in the bank, kids. And it is the first thing you should address with your client:

“What is your social media presence and how can we use it as leverage to make this project more successful?”

For any blogs you write, you should be cross-promoting them on your client’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

For any SEO strategy you undertake, it can only help to cross-link through social media channels in order to direct eyeballs to your projects.

For any content development, you should be engaging readers on social media to entice them to WANT to learn more about your client’s project.

If content is king, social media is its free-wheelin’ cousin who can always be counted on to bring a respectable bottle of wine to any family holiday.*

Translation: Content is the most important thing, but social media supports your goals.

And don’t be afraid to charge for these social media services. You will spend the time crafting professional status updates, engaging influencers on Twitter and monitoring conversation across all channels. This takes time and skill, and these skills equate to billable hours.

Never miss an opportunity to offer another layer of value to your suite of services.

*Social media should not be counted on to bring wine to any family event.

**I would strongly recommend that you not use social media after drinking any amount of wine.

***The author of this post is not actually drunk right now, despite her poor sentence structure.

Do you have questions about social media or how to set social media pricing? I’m always happy to answer questions (via the comments field.)

Amanda Smyth Connor is a social media manager for a major publishing company and has managed online communities and content development for many start-up and Fortune 500 companies.  She has been a professional editor for more years than she can remember.

advice, resources

Homework Help for Writers – Social Media Tips

"Lamb diaper" was, oddly enough, not a very strong search term.
"Lamb diaper" was, oddly enough, not a very strong search term.

By Amanda Smyth Connor

Before starting any new writing project, you need to do your homework. Any new client will either enjoy or demand the added benefit of linking and keyword usage, and not everyone has the money to spend on high-end social media tools like Radian6.

SocialMention.com is a good place to start for keyword research. It’s free to use and will get you off and running in terms of weighing the strength of the brand you are writing about, or narrowing down the subject matter that you are tackling.

Here’s how to start:

Let’s use “diapers” as an example.

1.  Go to SocialMention.com and type in “diapers.”

2.  For the sake of this trial run, adjust your search results to reflect the time period as being “one day,” but you can track back as far as one month.

3.  Now that you have searched “diapers,” you will see your search results on the left hand side of the screen, as well as a running timeline of live mentions from Twitter and Facebook.  You will see a variety of results that estimate the strength of “diapers” as a keyword and search term, such as:

  • The word “diapers” is mentioned online every 21 seconds, on average.
  • The information sentiment surrounding “diapers” is strongly neutral but this word is also often used positively.
  • You can view a list of the top keywords used in conjunction with diapers, with “baby” as the most often used keyword and “wings” (a feature in some adult diapers) as the second most commonly used term associated with diapers. (Oddly enough, when I started writing this blog post a few days ago, “porn” was the number 3 result on this list of terms associated with diapers. What??)
  • You can also view the top hashtags associated with diapers (“moms,”) and the top sources where this word is mentioned most frequently (Twitter.)

4. You can continue to investigate what social media users are saying about “diapers” by clicking along the top navigation bar. You can then view results within specific sources, like microblogs, comments, images, news, etc. This way, you can see what people really think about diapers…and it just might surprise you! (I’m kidding. It’s pretty much what you would expect.)

5. Now that you have a good overview of the buzz on diapers, you can dig deeper by investigating specific brands (“Pampers diapers,” “Luvs Diapers,” “cloth diapers,” etc) so that when you do start your writing project, not only do you know what keywords are being used heavily in support of your content, but you will have a better understanding of your product and how it is perceived by users.

By using this tool, you’ll give yourself a leg up on the research end of your project, and you can tack this simple leg work on as part of your overall billable hours, or you can use it as added value to impress your clients…and BLAMO! You can call it a day and put on your “Team Awesomesauce” jacket. You earned it.

Amanda Smyth Connor is a social media manager for a major publishing company, owns her own wedding planning business and has managed online communities and content development for many start-up and Fortune 500 companies.  She has been a professional editor for more years than she can remember.