Pleasant greetings from Neovia, everyone! We’ve rounded up some of the top stories in the social media world to help you stay up to speed with trends and developments that will enhance your online marketing strategy and experience.

This week we bring you an assortment of little stories, some of which point inward toward your business use, and some of which are helpful in your outward marketing efforts. So there you have it. Social media advice–inside out of your work bubble.

Be on the lookout every week for news, tips from pros, reviews, emerging technology, and a whole bundle of thought-provoking articles on this ever-developing, exciting world of social media.

To Use Inside Your Company

4 Steps to Social Media SEO Success. Listening, Content, Socializing, and Measuring are the four keys to increasing your search engine optimization with social media, according to TopRank’s Lee Odden.

6 Ways to Generate and Nurture More Leads on Twitter. If you’re struggling to find ways to use Twitter in your B2B relations, struggle no longer. It’s easy and highly effective, but you have to read on…

Best Practices for a Killer Corporate Blog. It’s certainly not enough to just have a blog. The art of blogging and keeping your readers engaged is indeed an art, but an understandable one. IMedia Connection tells you what you need to know and do if you’re starting your corporate blog.

What It Takes To Discover Your Social Media Star. Whether you’re looking to hire out a social media expert or turn a current employee into one, here are the essential elements you’ll need to look for in a qualified candidate.

To Use Outside Your Company

Forrester: Why Most Marketers Should Forgo Foursquare. According to research, a very small percent of mobile users are using geolocation technology, but this doesn’t mean they won’t. Read on for what you need to know about geolocation, where it is, and where it’s going.

8 Criteria for Facebook Marketing Success: Facebook has more users than any other social media platform out there. While current trends in conversation with this platform concern what the ROI will be, this article focuses on how to use Facebook professionally and maturely to accomplish your marketing goals.

5 Qualities of Successful Online Video. Anyone can post videos of their cat falling off of a chair, but if you really want to have an impact with video, you’re going to need to start thinking more artfully about your video strategy. Here are some tips you’re going to want to take to heart.

Image Courtesy BigMouthMedia.Com via vannevar.blogspot.com

This week we bring you a group of articles on the ascending popularity of the geolocation feature present in places like FourSquare and Twitter and what it means for your business. In addition, we’ve got a bundle of articles on efficacy with small and big picture ideas of how you can get the most out of your social media.

Be on the lookout every week for news, tips from pros, reviews, emerging technology, and a whole bundle of thought-provoking articles on this ever-developing, exciting world of social media.

Geolocation Apps

5 ways to use FourSquare to market your location based business. As with most social media, it’s not enough to be just be on it. How are you going to use a geo-location device like Foursquare to get people checking into your business? Here are some creative tips!

How to add your business to Twitter places. In addition to Foursquare, Twitter Places was recently announced. If you’re wondering how you can take advantage of the popularity of Twitter in conjunction with the geo-location trend, well here are your answers.

Foursquare vs. Gowalla vs. MyTown: Which is better for business? Here’s the match up! Foursquare is still the most popular, but how long with that be the case? And in whatever case, which one do you need to keep your eye on for business? Discussion within.

Efficiency

What to Do About Social Media Overload, or How to Network Online and Still Have Time to Run Your Business. Even if your social media campaign is successful, to be sure it’s come at some cost–time. So to give you more time to run your business, Patrice-Anne Rutledge some advice on how to lower the time you’re spending on social media while still maintaining your successful status.

5 helpful iphone apps for the office. If we’re talking efficiency, what better to talk about than the magical, all encompassing Iphones?But with so many apps to choose from, which one’s will assist your business the most? Here are five.

How to be the Life of the Social Media Party. We’ll admit, this one is less about efficiency, and more a great article on approach. This is a particularly poignant article comparing success in the social media world to success in the social living world. Social media can and should bring out a character for people to like, and it all comes back to the individual behind the screen.

photo: photo courtesy of red5standindyby

One of our super-fans recently asked us to do a blog post on Facebook Events do’s and don’ts. We’re always happy to oblige our fans, but in this case I happened to be inundated with tons of inappropriate Event Invitations that same week, thus compelling me to get this one out as quickly as possible.

(As a side note, it will always amaze me how many people don’t know netiquette rule #1: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.)

Events That Go On For Weeks

When It’s OK: When the Event actually goes on for weeks. For example, a community theater might have a running showings for four weeks. It’s perfectly acceptable for the administrator of the event to make it last for as long as the show is running.

When It’s Not OK: When the Event isn’t really an Event in the true sense of the word, or you’re using it for multi-level marketing. For example, an individual wants their friends to vote for them in an online contest that runs for 3 weeks. While your friends are happy to help out, your event is taking up real estate in their Upcoming Events tab. What would be the appropriate to do this is to send a message to your friends letting them know about the contest, and then follow up throughout the contest time period with regular status updates reminding people with the link. This would be far more effective, not to mention polite, than the Ongoing Event anyway.

The Multi-level Marketing Events don’t really surprise us. Scams, shams and pyramid schemes will always find a way to SPAM you in such a way they think looks credible.

Gray Area: When the Event can only loosely be categorized as an Event. For example, an organization might be holding a membership drive for the entire month of August. Or, a retail location might be having it’s annual summer sale that lasts all week. For some people, this would be acceptable use of an Ongoing Event. For others, it’s a nuisance. Think about the people you’re trying to reach and ask yourself if they might be annoyed by this method of getting their attention. In social media, the old adage “All press is good press” is not true. You run the risk of looking like you don’t know what you’re doing in social media, and worse – that you don’t care about whether you are bothering your audience. You’ve just turned an opportunity for engagement into television advertising and SPAM.

In the case of the retail sale, if it’s not very long that might be information people find useful and helpful. I would say the use of an Ongoing Event is acceptable in this case, especially since it might be something I want to share with a friend who likes that store by inviting her to the Event.

Inviting Out-of-Area People to a Local Event

When It’s OK: When there is a reason you want them to see the Event, or there’s a chance they might actually attend. For example, a local chapter of an organization is hosting a member of another chapter as their featured speaker. It would be acceptable to invite people to the local Event from the other chapter, despite the fact they’re in another city, as a way of letting them know that the Event is featuring one of their own. If the Event is notable enough to drive attendees to travel to your city, then this is acceptable as well.

When It’s Not OK: When you’re simply inviting all of your friends without discernment of their physical location. Select All is the devil in Facebook. You should never be selecting all, unless all of your friends are 100 percent local. When you Select All, you SPAM. There are just no two ways about it.

If you haven’t already, create Lists for your Facebook Friends. On your home page, click Friends on the lefthand side of the page. Then, click Create List. From there, simply select the Friends that fit that category. I have my Facebook friends on multiple lists by geography/location (Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Rio Grande Valley, etc.), relationship to myself (family, high school, college, etc.), and where I met them (bloggers, Twitter folks, clients, etc.). I send out not just Event Invitations, but also Page Suggestions, according to whether they would be interested.

Gray Area: If the Event is in a city that is close enough to another city that traveling to an Event is not a major effort. Again, ask yourself whether or not the people you’re sending the Event Invitation to are interested enough to travel. Also consider whether your idea of “close” is the same to everyone else and that the Event date and time are amenable to short travel. For example, in my city of Corpus Christi we’re willing to drive 2 hours to an event in San Antonio if it’s on the weekend since there’s literally nothing around us for a 2-hour driving radius. However, my San Antonio friends would be hard-pressed to drive 2 hours to a 6 pm weekday Event that ends at 9 pm, putting them back home at 11 pm with work the next morning.

Events That Aren’t Actually Events

When It’s OK: In our opinion, never. It’s never OK to misuse an application when you have other methods of getting the word out. For example, you’ve launched a new website or you’re transitioning from a Facebook user account for your business (which you should never have had in the first place, as it is a violation of Facebook Terms of Service) to a fan page. These things are not Events. They are not happenings that I can purchase a ticket to, walk in the door to, etc. They are SPAM.

Though it requires more effort (Gasp! You mean, don’t just do what’s easiest for me instead of what’s better for my audience?!?), what would be the appropriate to do this is to send a message to your friends letting them know about this non-event, and then follow up for an acceptable time period with regular status updates reminding people with the link. Again, as with the Ongoing Event, this would be far more effective, not to mention polite.

Gray Area: There is none. I know you wanted to be the exception to this rule, but unfortunately there aren’t any exceptions. Try thinking about a way to make your non-event more interesting to your audience and give them ways to back up your cause. If you’re introducing a new website, post screen shots of it and boast about it’s new capabilities and tell us why you launched it. If you’re transitioning to a fan page, enlist your Friends to help you spread the word by telling them how they can share it.

But, hey, if you want to create an Event Invitation to this blog post and invite all the Event offenders on your Facebook, we’ll look the other way just this once.

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The moral of the story, kids, is that just because you can do it in social media, doesn’t mean you should. Careful consideration of how your audience would like best to be reached with a particular piece of information is a good measuring stick for what tool you use to do it.

Intro photo credit: Photos by Fitsum Belay/iLLIMETER illimeter.com

It seems everyone these days is starting a fan page – which is great! Social media, and Facebook itself, is democratic marketing. Everyone has an opportunity.

Unfortunately, people don’t realize what kind of power you have with Facebook – that power can be used to engage fans, or turn them off. And having the same fan page suggested to you over and over again, despite your attempts to ignore it, is going to turn potential fans off.

How do you stand out amidst fan page suggestion mania?

Here’s the method we employ for growing fan pages.

We send a blanket page suggestion to all our friends at once (actually, I usually target using friend lists, but that’s a whole other ball of wax).

Then, about twice a week for a few weeks, I share it on my wall with a little something about why I think people should add the page.

We don’t resend the page suggestion unless a) a substantial amount of time has passed (months), b) we’ve added a substantial number of new friends (100), or c) there have been major new developments on the page.

If you’re looking to increase the number of fans you have, then it’s best to do that using the fans who have already added the page. Post a share request on the fan page wall that reads something like, “Hey, if you like what you see here, then do us a favor and help spread the word. Simply click on the page, then click on Suggest Page to Friends. We appreciate it!” Then it spreads organically and you get more reach than you would from just your own network.

We hope that helps! Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Always be thinking about the golden rule: Facebook unto others as you would like them to Facebook unto you.

Neovia Solutions is a digital business solutions company, specializing in social media marketing strategy. For more information on our services, visit our site here.

1. Limit the email notifications you receive.

Twitter and Facebook default to sending you an email every time any event occurs in their systems. Examples include new followers, direct messages, comments, posts on your wall, etc. If you’d like, you can turn most of these off. In Twitter, you can do this by going to Settings, Notices. You can uncheck the boxes to receive emails.  In Facebook, you can go to the Settings menu, then Notifications and pick from the various options available.  If you don’t want to turn these off completely, you can at least filter the emails so that they skip the Inbox and go straight to email folders that you can check later.

2. Use groups.

As your list of friends and followers continues to grow, it can be tough to keep up with these relationships. One way to do this is by grouping your contacts. In Facebook, you can start this under your Friends menu. You’ll see an option to Create a New List. (For example, you could create a list for high school friends and assign all of those type contacts to that list.) For Twitter, you’ll need to use another service to do this. I’ll profile your options in the paragraph below. Once you’ve set these up, you can review the postings from each group separately, taking advantage of having them sorted by relevance.

3.  Use software tools for Twitter.

There are literally hundreds of tools available to complement Twitter, and we’ve tested many of them.  For day-to-day interaction on Twitter, we use HootSuite when a web-based interface is preferred. It allows you to set up multiple accounts, shorten urls, and set up groups – all without installing any software on your computer. If you prefer to use installed software, Tweetdeck and Seesmic are the favorites. Both of these are also adding Facebook interaction as well, and are well worth a look if you use the same computer most of the time.  You can also use applications for your mobile phone. One favorite is Twittelator, and other enjoy Tweetie and Twitterberry. These allow you to see @replies and direct messages easily, search, and reply or retweet with fewer keystrokes.

The fears all seem to revolve around not being able to control the message and not knowing how to use social media for customer engagement. Interestingly, Andy Sernowitz posted this on his blog earlier this week: “If you want to increase control in social media, you need to do more social media outreach so people want to talk with you instead of about you.”

Amen. Don’t be afraid of participating in social media. Be afraid of not participating.

It’s not a secret that social media is a fun way to connect with friends, but you might not know that you can use those same tools to find employees (or a job), increase your sales, build your brand, connect with your customers, gain real-time feedback, and much more. Attend one of our workshops to find out how you can apply these same tools in your organization. Or let us customize a hands-on consulting package to jump start your efforts. Contact us to find out how to get started.