How Social Media Can Help Your Blog

Now that we’ve talked about the simplest way to drive readership back to your blog with social media in past, let’s look at the methods used more frequently today than in the past – social media.
This is the age of social media and while there are probably plenty of people who subscribe to your feed and read it that way, a lot more people wait for updates on your Facebook Page or Twitter feed where they can read it on their phones or tablets or computers or (depending on what year you’re reading this) some other high tech device that probably straps to the side of their head.

Tools like Facebook and Twitter are not replacements for, nor are they necessary for a blog to be successful. They are, however, immensely powerful when used properly in conjunction with a blog and can both grow readership and maintain it.

First, let’s look at what grows readership on a site like Facebook. Let’s say you automatically post each of your blog posts to your Facebook Page where your followers can see it on their walls instantly each day. On any given day, someone can click that link, read your post and then click “Like” and share it with their several hundred friends.

Even if you only have 10 or 20 people following you on Facebook, each of them could have a reach of 100 or more people who have never seen your blog. That’s 1,000 or 2,000 people potentially seeing any one of your blog posts, even with just 10 or 20 followers. The number grows rapidly from there as your Like count increases.

So, how do you use social media effectively to grow these numbers and how do you avoid getting stuck in that classic trap of too much Facebook and not enough blogging? Here are some strategies for each of what I consider to be the big three in social media.

Facebook

We’re going to take a few short detours in this section because social media is most powerful when you use it in its entirety. This goes double for Facebook because, I’ll be honest here, I hear way too often how Facebook isn’t powerful enough for what people want it to do – namely, sell things.

But, Facebook is not an advertising platform. In fact, it’s even less of an ad platform than your blog (which is admittedly, not built for marketing either). If you plan on using Facebook as a supplement to your blog, to build your brand, I highly recommend that you spend some time better understanding what it is for and how it is meant to be used.

I’ll paraphrase a bit from a book I read recently that kind of blew my mind (in a good way):
Social media works when you stop thinking of it as an advertising platform. There is no outline, road map or blueprint for success with Facebook. Just talk to people, get to know them, build relationships and the trust will come with it.

Good stuff and spot on true
The reason companies like Chevrolet are backing out of social media is because they don’t get it. At the same time, the people who do get it, don’t really get it either. Just like the big companies that screw up their Facebook Pages, the agencies and social media gurus think it is a cure all for web marketing needs.
Hint: it’s not as you think.

Facebook is a social network. It is designed to help people connect with other people. So, when brands enter the fray, things get a little messy. You can be successful, but only if you think of yourself and your blog as a person, not as a brand trying to sell a product (your content) to the readers.

You have to overload people with valuable content, talk about all sorts of random stuff possibly unrelated to your blog and, whatever you do, don’t try and convince people every day to go to your blog and read it, preferably clicking on something in the process. Social media works best when you step back from the precipice and use it as it is meant to be used, as a networking tool.

So, how do you do this with Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform?
Personally, I don’t invest a lot of time into Facebook or the other networks listed below. When I do use them, I automate the process as much as possible and I take advantage of mobile technology to keep up with those I follow and to ensure everything is processed and uploaded on time and all comments are replied to.

Here are a few things you should do, however, when building out your Facebook Page.

Create a Page

Even if your blog will be branded with your name, create a Page to supplement your Profile. Profiles are for personal connections and friends and they are limited to 5,000 total friends. Pages have no such limits and allow you much greater freedom in contacting large volumes of people. Here’s a look at my Page:

Blog Posts
Share every post you write with a link on your timeline. Do more than just share the link though. Add a short blurb with it that people can see in their newsfeed and encourage comments, like this:

Reply to Everything
You won’t find many comments on your Page. Get the Pages app for your phone (separate from the core Facebook app) and it will send notifications whenever someone posts something on your Page. You can then reply immediately, from your phone and it will only take a minute.

Share Fun Stuff
If you find something interesting or fun that doesn’t fit in a full length blog post or that you don’t think fits the theme of your site, share it on Facebook. Images you find online, tips someone else posts or links are all good options.

Promote
Don’t be afraid to promote things like your freebie. Nobody will complain you about it. You can drop the squeeze pages code directly into Facebook as a custom app if you wish to.

Interact
Set a quota each day or each week to reach out to some of the people who follow you and talk with them about their businesses, their needs, their readership. Look for questions they post and respond to them in a way that shows you are engaged with your Likes.
Facebook is an immensely powerful tool, but only when used properly and only when supplemented with real experience and authentic regard for your readers.

Twitter

Twitter follows the same rules as Facebook, but fortunately for you, Twitter is a whole lot simpler. If you haven’t used Twitter before (which I find unlikely), here is the gist.

1. Create an account
2. Add people you want to follow
3. Write 140 character tweets about what you’re doing
4. Talk to the people you follow

That’s about it – Twitter is both a broadcast and interaction channel. Large businesses use it as a means to share information with people (something Facebook is not as good for), and smaller businesses use it to create relationships and maintain a public image of helpfulness. You can even drive direct clicks to your site through Twitter fairly easy (again, something Facebook stinks at).

If you look at my Twitter account, about half of my posts are direct responses to other people. I have a number of active conversations going with followers and people I follow (which is a very small number you will note). I also post all of my blog posts here, as I did on Facebook and I go out and try to find people to interact with at least once a day.

I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter – again, the mobile apps are immensely helpful with this – but I do make sure I have content on there every single day. Content is what I do and I know the value of consistency in producing it.

YouTube

YouTube is a strange site for a few reasons. I (along with plenty of other people) batch it together with social media, but it’s not quite the same. In fact, when YouTube was created, it wasn’t much of a social network at all. It was a repository for videos and people could leave simple comments. It was a lot more like a tumblog site (like tumblr or blogger).

Today, YouTube has been overhauled a fair number of times by Google to turn it into more of a social site and that means many of the same rules of social interaction apply, but not all of them.
Think about how YouTube works.

• You have a profile: http://www.youtube.com/user/xxxxx
• You upload content to a channel: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&feature=xxxx
• You tag and distribute that content
• People can subscribe or follow you and leave comments

So, it’s a content distribution platform with a social network baked in, meaning you could easily just focus on one of those two aspects and get it wrong. But you shouldn’t do that. To be successful with YouTube, you must integrate the social and the content distribution and then you’ll start getting a lot more views.

At the same time, you need to integrate the fact that YouTube exists with your other content. In my case, I generally just point people to my site where they can watch these videos. The content takes care of itself from there.That’s all.
A post from http://idealtechblog.com
How Social Media Can Help Your Blog

7 Steps for YouTube Success

YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world (well, if you pretend that search box is a search engine). It can drive massive amount of traffic, help build your brand, and work wonders for your SEO.
Alas, many organizations find the idea of producing all that content intimidating, not to mention the platform itself. Either that or they upload some glossy, expensive, and unsuitable corporate video and hope for the best. But it doesn’t have to be this way! The seven steps below will help you succeed with YouTube too.

1. Find Your Angle

The first thing you need to do is think about your overall YouTube content strategy: what your videos are going to be about, how they are going to be presented, how they’re going to hook viewers, how often you are going to release new ones, etc. For some organizations this might be easy, for others it may be much harder.
As always at the beginning of a new content-based campaign, the single most important thing to do is to get together with your colleagues and brainstorm some ideas. Nothing is too stupid or outrageous at this point. You can always filter the ideas later.
If you work alone, that’s no excuse for skipping this step: get together with your friends, family or whoever you can drag along to get a brainstorming session going. You’ll be amazed how many great ideas come out.
Keep the following things in mind at this stage too:

• Glossy corporate video tends to do less well than more “authentic” material (or, to put it another way, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to do well on YouTube).
• Think about the things that you and your associates watch and especially share on YouTube. That means everything, not just content related to work.
• Videos should either inspire positive emotions (excitement, amusement, awe, etc.) or solve specific problems for people (tutorials, reviews, etc). Just talking about your company won’t cut it.
• Little and often works well. Work on releasing short videos frequently. Avoid long intros or brand spikes. Put your logo at the end, not the beginning.
• Think as laterally as you can about subject matter. Just because you sell plumbing supplies doesn’t necessarily mean that your videos have to be about plumbing. Think about other areas that could be of interest to your target audience.

2. Make a Plan

Neither YouTube nor Google care if you upload new videos with clockwork regularity, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care.
Working to a specific publication schedule is vital for getting things done when you have all sorts of potentially more urgent tasks to look after. That might be one new video per week, one new video per month, or whatever suits you. Just stick to whatever you decide.
If you're pressed for time, a useful approach is to batch produce videos (or make one longer one that you can cut up) which you can release steadily over time. It’s generally better to do that than to release them all at once.

3. Shoot!

Shooting a new video isn’t as hard or intimidating as it first might seem, and as noted above, you don’t have to hire an expensive video company to do well. It’s also much better to look deliberately amateurish than to fail at professional production.
This isn’t the place for a detailed tutorial on how to shoot great video, but some quick tips might prove useful:

• Use whatever equipment you have or can afford: a Flip, a cameraphone, whatever. Anything is better than nothing, and you can always work on improving quality as time goes by.
• If you don’t have proper studio lights, use natural light on a sunny day if you can (even better: shoot outside). Ordinary interior lighting will never look good.
• Get lapel mics. They’re one of the few things worth buying specifically from the start. The improvement that even a cheap one will give to your sound quality is immense.
• Have fun and don’t worry! You can always edit out the goofy bits later (... or not, if you prefer).
• Keep happy accidents. If this guy  (warning: NSFW – strong language) had succeeded in his attempt, he’d have got way less publicity than he ended up with.

4. Upload & Optimize

Once you’ve got your shiny new video, it’s time to get it posted! The process of uploading a video is pretty simple and YouTube will guide you through that if you’ve never done it before. It’s the process of optimizing the video with which many people struggle.
It’s actually a simple process, however. We’re just talking about the various text fields that YouTube allows you to edit for each video. Google itself may have moved well beyond a site’s copy as its key ranking factor, but YouTube is still pretty backward in that regard.
Before you start, you’ll want to do a bit of keyword research. Keywords you're already using from an existing SEO or AdWords campaign may be useful, but YouTube also provides its own keyword tool.
As with the AdWords tool, it gives you estimated traffic levels for various phrases, as well as giving you a lot of new ideas, especially for more niche terms. These are well worth noting! If you’re going to struggle to rank well for a competitive term, opt instead for targeting a few niche terms around the same subject.
These text fields are not the only factor for YouTube ranking, but getting them right is essential. Especially important is the tags field, where your research above will go. Separate the different keywords with commas or put them in quote marks, or you can end up with a bit of a mess.
The title is massively important as well, of course, both for keywords and for encouraging people to click through. Experiment with some different formats here and see what works best for you, but always remember that you have to use the title to give people a reason to spend their time opening your video.

5. Promote

Simply uploading a video and hoping for the best is rarely enough. Start to promote it! Part of YouTube’s ranking algorithm is based upon the number of views you’ve already had (yes, it’s a bit of chicken and egg), so try to get a good number of views early on for each video.
You can do this by embedding the video in your own blog and Facebook page (always embed, don’t link), tweeting about it and putting it on any other social profiles you have. If you have a good enough relationship with any other site owners, ask them to embed it too: remember, your content can’t be shared and promoted enough.
One exception always to embedding – it's good to get at least one plain old link to each of your videos on YouTube, preferably from a site you don't own yourself. It helps with rankings.

6. Think About Your Channel

Your channel is your home on YouTube, just like your profile on Twitter or your page on Facebook. It’s where your videos live, but it can be customized. Make sure you add all the information you can to it: your links (including social profiles), description, location, etc.
Once you have some videos up there, you can start to create playlists too, and also select which of your videos (i.e., your most popular!) should be featured or promoted further.
It’s also worth adding some other channels to your own page, as you see fit, as part of the spirit of getting involved in the site as a whole (see just below). Add channels that you like or think are relevant to your customers, but not your competitors, of course!

7. Get Involved

Remember that YouTube is essentially a social site. It’s all about sharing and commenting. If you want other people to interact with your videos, do the same elsewhere (share the love!) This will help build up your profile and pull people into your channel.
Comment on other people’s videos (or even post video responses), share, subscribe to channels – do all the usual things you’d do on a social media site. Becoming a regular commenter on a channel you like or respect can work well.
Remember at this stage to think about your customers, not your competitors. Many companies, when they think about social media, start to say things such as, “But what’s the point of following my competitors? They’re no use to me.” Of course not, but why were you even thinking about that in the first place? The thing to do is work out where you potential customers hang out and get involved there.

Image Credit: Keenan Milligan

7 Steps for YouTube Success

Guide To: Producing Your First Youtube Tutorial for Beginner

Editor’s note: This post is contributed by Tam. Tam works for joomlashine.com. She loves to talk about Search engine optimization tips and Social media marketing and she’s always keen to get more and share more knowledge about these fields.
YouTube has become an important channel for relaxation and study. You can find many video tutorials to give you tips or guide you through doing something new. Video tutorials are not only used to share knowledge but also to help businesses market their brands and provide more visual documentation for customers. And it’s not that difficult or expensive to do. I’ve just started creating tutorials for JoomlaShine recently and I want to share with you some my experiences.
This tutorial will show you how to produce high quality YouTube tutorial without the use of a studio or even a video camera.

You will be making a How-to video tutorial, or product introduction with voice over and subtitles. YouTube has a function to translate the captions so that viewers from all over the world can understand what is in the video. Subtitles also make your YouTube tutorials text searchable so people can find them easily. It’s best to keep the length of the video in under 6 minutes – people don’t like to watch a video if it is too long.

Prepare to record

video outline

In a simple way using bullets points and numbers, prepare the outline for your video. Read it many times over and familiarize yourself with it. Arrange the text to suit the flow of the message you are trying to deliver.

Presentation

Make your tutorial more attractive with callouts (video illustrations such as text or pictures), some flash effects, or with PowerPoint slides. Prepare the things you want to add to the video, and make sure that they can be combined.

Software for recording

I use Camtasia to record my videos because it has many useful functions and special effects. You can use a free trial version for 30 days or buy it for $299. To make the highest quality of video, you should choose the select area with dimensions for Full HD: 1280 x 720.

Recording

Separate your recordings

When recording the video tutorial, it’s important to record the video tutorial and audio instructions as two separate files. You can start recording the video tutorial first, and then, record your audio instructions. This will help you to minimise your mistakes and reduce editing time. Arrange everything you need to include in the tutorial (what you want recorded) in the selected area. Make sure that if you open a browser, a folder or anything else, that it’s something Camtasia can capture.

Recording video

Record the video tutorial carefully. Perform your steps slower by about 20%. Focus on each step, try not to make an error and don’t do any unnecessary actions. Some of the first videos I recorded took up to 7 times to get right. Practice makes perfect so don’t expect miracles and give up on the first few runs.

Recording Voice

Write the video transcript before the voice recording. It’s better for you to read from the transcript file to reduce mistakes. Try to record in a clear and natural voice, and it’s best to record in a quiet room. Control your voice and add stress when you want to focus on something.

Editing the recorded file

Dimensions and Clip Speeds

Choose the editing dimension as your recording dimension 1280 x 720 – that’s the best dimension for your video. Remove all unnecessary frames and make the video play faster during downloads or set ups, while searching for something or typing text, the usual stuff that people already know how to do. This will keep your video shorter.

Zooming and Transition

Use the zoom function when you enter text or show a website URL. The video will be shown in a much smaller size on Youtube, so zoom in for your viewers. The duration for the zoom effect can be set to 1 second for a smoother zoom. Use transition effects between different parts of the video. My favourite effects are Page turn, Cube rotate, Fade, Fade through black, with a duration of 1 second.

Callout and Effects

Add an extend frame to insert a callout to make sure all activities in the video stop when the callout appears. The length of the extend frame must be enough for people to understand the callout: normally I give mine 3 to 5 seconds.

To add more effects, Sony Vegas Pro is my first recommendation. You can make any effect you want although it will seem difficult at first to create effects manually. If this is a problem, you can try SWiSH Max which features many built-in effects for your videos. For example, I often use SWiSH Max to generate type writing effects for text in my video.

Produce a YouTube tutorial

Exporting Your Video

Don’t use the Camtasia preset options because the video will be darker than normal and the details will be blurry. Here’s how you can export into a high quality video:

1. Under Custom product setting, click to Add/edit preset. Choose New to create the new production preset. You can add the name as you want, for example "Custom HD".
   
   
2. Please choose AVI as your video file format, it will help you have a high- quality videos with true brightness.
   
   
3. Set the frame rate at 15 frames per second (fps) to produce a nice video with a small size. The best rate is 30 fps but this makes your video very large.
   
   
4. Create the subtitle file for your YouTube video. You can use Aegisub software; it’s free and easy to use. The subtitles should be exported in srt format.
   
   

Upload a YouTube tutorial

Tutorial Title and Description

The title for your tutorial should include the content and keywords. You can create a title of up to 70 characters that will show in YouTube search results, but only the first 40 characters of the title appear when the tutorial is shown as a related video. In your description, describe the video briefly, include your link in the first 3 lines so all viewers can see it without clicking "show more". Use keywords.

Tags will help your video appear with other videos in the same topics and thus to the same target viewers. Use long keywords to define tags and add as many tags as you can.

Set privacy settings to public and remember to make the video available on mobile phones and TV. Allow comments or responses.

Add Annotations to ask for subscribers, to redirect to other videos in your channels, or to guide the viewer to watch your video in the best size.

Group your videos in one topic on a playlist. This allows viewers to follow all your tutorials easily without having to do searches for related videos.

Final words

So, we’ve finished producing a high quality YouTube tutorial with only a computer and some software. Get started with your own tutorial right now or if you’ve already created a YouTube tutorial and have tips to share, please feel free to comment below.

How to Use YouTube to Boost Your Web Site’s SEO Rankings

Seeing that there are more than 20 billion web pages on the internet, the competition to get the best position on the Internet is huge. It is vital to keep in mind that there is not a single SEO technique that will guarantee you the top ranking on a Google results page. However, if you combine strategic on-page and off-page tactics in the right manner, you will get much better results. Search engine optimization is a very special skill, and to get the recipe right will take some time and practice.

There are various search engine optimization practices that you can use to noticeably improve ranking on the top search engines. Social networking is one of these. Social networking websites have become more and more important as an online marketing method and a lot of people are starting to make use of it. Most people you know will probably already be a member of websites such as Facebook and Twitter – and both of them have proven to be very effective as online marketing tools, especially since Google has begun to index Twitter status updates.
YouTube, as well, is quickly becoming a very effective online marketing instrument, since it greatly boosts the number of visitors to your webpage due to the high ranking of videos on Google. Using YouTube for SEO is one of the most effective and inexpensive techniques available currently.

Here are 3 strategies for using YouTube to boost your site’s SEO rankings:

1. Complete the YouTube Meta Tag Data
YouTube is mostly used within the SEO context to get your website on the first page of Google rankings. The most popular videos on YouTube will appear on Google’s search results if they are properly constructed within the YouTube website. In return, when uploading your YouTube video, you may get a higher spot in the search engine results if you have entered the best keywords, descriptions and tags to help your target market find you.

2. Embed Your Video on Your Site
Another way to use YouTube for SEO is to embed your videos into your website content. If you embed the videos into your blogs or website, you increase the chances that more people will view your videos, which leads to a great increase in the popularity of your website, resulting in a higher search engine ranking. Google prefers web pages that have embedded YouTube video content into their websites, and these pages will in most cases get higher rankings than ones without YouTube video content.

3. Create Your Own YouTube channel
Once you have some videos, you can construct your own keyword-rich YouTube channel to house your videos. This channel contains a link to your web page and therefore adds to the number of backlinks that point to your website. Why is that important? Because the search engines favor one-way links back to your site from high traffic sites, and you get more search engine “juice” from such a link.
There are many ways in which you can use YouTube for SEO optimization. You must just make sure that your videos are well designed and constructed properly. Video marketing is drastically gaining ground over websites with just text content – and millions of people all over the world are watching YouTube on a daily basis. This is definitely a market and a strategy that you want to tap into today.

8 Ways How to Socialize Your Video Marketing Strategy

If you have a knack for making great video content for your products and services than you’ve already won half the battle. The other half is optimizing your videos so they have a better chance of being found in YouTube’s search engine, otherwise your customers will never find it! What’s the point in producing quality content for your video marketing strategy if nobody is going to see it.

These 8 tips will help you optimize your YouTube videos so you can get as many views as possible:

1. Aim to make a viewer watch the video for at least the first 8 seconds. This is a crucial time to engage a viewer because, if they wander off before those 8 seconds, that view doesn’t count towards your total view count on YouTube. Get their attention first and save your biography for later.

2. Post your YouTube videos on your Facebook page. Sharing them on other networks like Twitter and Tumblr are great, but Facebook has a great “viral quality” for videos compared to other networks, in my experience. Posting your videos everywhere possible multiplies your opportunities for exposure and provides cross-channel traffic between the different social sites.

3. Embed your YouTube videos within your blog posts. I would suggest writing a short blog post to accompany your new videos so you can gain some more traffic to your website as well as giving more exposure to your YouTube channel.

4. If you want people to share it, then ask! People will often do what you request, but you have to come out and ask for it first! Try telling people in the video to share it if they enjoyed it and remind them with non-intrusive text on-screen and in the video’s description.

5. Pay attention to the directions of each website that you submit your video to. There are small differences that you need to be aware of between sites that allow you to upload video content so ensure that you are following them accordingly or your video marketing strategy performance might suffer.

6. Tags are your friends. Get creative and imagine what words your target market is going to type into the search engine that is relevant to your content. Obviously your brand name is a given but add any and all relevant terms and keywords that you could picture someone searching for.

7. Allow people to embed your video. If you don’t, you are limiting people’s ability to share your content.

8. Make your titles and descriptions catchy and keyword optimized. You need to strike the optimal balance between catchy and keyword optimized since you want to attract viewers and higher ranking in the YouTube and Google search results. Make sure your title is clear and accurate. If it’s misleading, you might get the notorious “thumbs down” rating!
Which tip do you see most beneficial to your video marketing strategy?

How to Download and convert YouTube Video Onto iTunes mp3

, Converting a file from YouTube to an MP3 file is not as difficult as some might think. YouTube files are called flv files. Because they are audio and video files, to save them as mp3 files, the video must be stripped and the audio must be saved. Fortunately, there is a free program online that will do this for you. Here is a tip from eHow.com

1. Go to YouTube.com and find the file that you want to convert. The file can be anything from a music video to a lecture in a college classroom. The only prerequisite is that there must be audio. When you have found the right video, click on the address bar and select "Ctrl+C" to copy the URL address.
   
   
2. Type into your browser the site, www.flvtomp3.com. Wait for the page to load. At the top of the page, make sure the button next to the words "By URL" are selected.
   
   
3. Paste the website address that you copied in step 1 into the text box on the page. Paste the text by either selecting "Ctrl+V" or by right-clicking and choosing "Paste" from the menu that appears. Click "OK" at the bottom of the page next to "I Accept the Terms."
   
   
4. Be patient as the next page opens and begins to load. A status bar at the top of the page will show the status of the file being downloaded. Once the status bar says "Status Complete," click on the "Convert" button on the bottom of the page.
   
   
5. Wait for a window to open that asks you what you want to do with the downloaded file. In this window, click the circle next to "Open File." Then click on the drop box in the window and select iTunes from the list. Click "OK." The iTunes program will open, and the song will begin to play.