Blog - social media management

{E49} Should I use a social media management system?

I got asked this question at a recent talk I gave about the importance of community to help you leap, launch and grow and of course, social media came up!

I figured that there are may be others with this burning question so thought I would share:

Key Takeaways:

  • Use a social media management system to follow specific keywords related to your brand, hashtags
  • Schedule out content but don’t be overly promotional- remember to spend time engaging!
  • Import your lists and create streams with people that you want to follow/connect with.

Resources:

productivity online business tools

[Business Ignite] 5 Must Have Tools To Run Your Online Business

Tool Time! In this episode of the podcast I share my favorite tools..well at least 5 of them! Admittedly, I’m a bit of a tool-junkie and love experimenting with new ones. Shiny object syndrome? Nah..not me! Okay, fine..maybe just a bit. The upside? You get to save time and hear about the best of the best. So, in no particular order, I bring you my must have tools to run your online business.

Schedule Once

Ever try planning a meeting with someone and you end up in email ping-pong hell? Where not only are you trying to figure out availabilities you also have different timezones to deal with?

Enter Schedule Once.

As the name implies, you schedule once.

When you create your Schedule Once account, you set your availabilities. It connects with your calendar and blocks off any existing meetings.

When someone wants to book time on your calendar, simply send them your schedule once link and they can select the time and zone that works best for them.

You get a notification and it’s booked in your calendar.  Et voila! End the email back and forth madness.

Boomerang

Boomerang is a  plugin for Gmail.

Just because you are hustling and working all hours of the day and night…*does not* mean your clients need to know.

Enter Boomerang. Reply to emails on your own time but schedule them out to go out with Boomerang at more appropriate times.

Have emails that you don’t need to deal with right now (webinar reminders, concert tickets..), Boomerang them to return at a specified date.

Social Media Management

Social media dashboards and scheduling tools. I personally use a combo of Hootsuite and Buffer.

Why not just use Twitter.com, you ask?

I use Hootsuite’s dashboard to get an overview of my Twitter lists, if there are conversations, keywords or hashtags I want to follow. I also use it to schedule out evergreen content like past episodes of my podcast or relevant blog posts.

I use BufferApp to curate and share content on the fly and like it’s ease of use as a browser plugin.

DropBox

Dropbox is a free service that lets you access your files from anywhere.

I use DropBox to easily share my raw podcast files with my podcast editor. With a shared DropBox folder, I can share files and access the edited files once they are ready. No need to email large files back and forth.

Similarly, when working with coaching clients, I use DropBox to share call recordings and pdfs.

And the beauty of it? It’s all in the cloud…accessible from anywhere, on any device.

Google..well..everything.

Google Drive is first on my list. I do *everything* in there..from working on documents (like coming up withe new product ideas) to collaborating on retreat planning (with my partner who is 3000 miles away!)

Analytics: you need this on your site. And it’s free. Enough said.

Google+ and Hangouts: I looove this platform and especially the hangouts and hangouts on air. Super easy to jump on and broadcast panels, shows, coaching calls, webinars…you name it!

 

What are some of your favorite tools? Let me know in the comments! 

online product launch tools

36 Tools To Rock Your Online Product Launch

In part one of this series, we looked at creating a smaller version of your larger product, without all the bells and whistles.

In part 2, we looked at figuring out who has the problem you are trying to solve with your product (or service) by talking or surveying your ideal client.

In part 3 we looked at an example of a minimal viable product launch.

In this final post of the series, we will look at the tools and apps you can use to create and launch your product.

Start with a survey

Survey Tools

 1. SurveyMonkey Free account includes up to 10 questions and 100 responses.  online survey tool

 2 .Google Forms: (free) Access with your gmail account.

 3 .Pop Survey (60 day free trial)

Use the feedback to validate your assumptions and identify the core problem.

Prioritize features. You don’t need everything in your first product. We’re at iPhone 5 (5S, 5C?..I can’t keep up) aren’t we? And I’m pretty sure they cut out a lot of features in the first version!

Stick to solving the core problem and save the bells and whistles for later.


Creating and Packaging Your Product

Product Idea: Member-Only Content

 You may decide that you want to offer a membership component to your product or service.

Some options are:

4. Password-Protected Page: You can create a password protected page on your website and only give access to paying members. This is what a Password Protected Page would look like on a WordPress site (password: test).  Note:  branding, pages, widgets are all still visible!

5. Create a Secret/Closed Facebook group where members only get added after they have paid for access. Pretty simple, eh? Cost: Free!

6. Ning is pretty much as out of the box as it gets. I’ve used this platform for several years problem-free and found it easy to get started. It’s easy to customize and has all the familiar social network features. They offer the mini- plan at  $19.99/year for up to 150 members. At this level, domain mapping is not included so you would have a url with yourbizname.ning.com.  I don’t see that as a negative though, considering you could link to your Ning network from within your site or share the link to members after they sign up and pay.

WordPress Specific

7. Optimize Press:   Optimize Press provides a lot of value. You can easily setup your membership site using the templates and divide the content into sections, modules etc. and display a navigation menu and/or side bar that makes it easy to access the content and understand how it is organized. Bonus: You can but choose from many templates and create sales pages as well! You can also install OptimizePress on multiple sites that you own.

I haven’t personally used the next two but they come with rave reviews as well:

8. Buddy-Press: Everything you need to start your own self-hosted and WordPress-powered social network.   (Opensource)

9. Wishlist:   Easy enough to use that you really don’t need to be a techie to build a great membership site with it. The plugin allows you to build a high quality membership site that looks sleek and is easy to manage as an admin. (single site license:  $97)

As you can see there are several to choose from depending on what is you need to do!


Product Idea: Video or Audio Recording

If you want to offer an interview-based product you can use Skype combined with a call recorder to record the audio or video. skype audio video calling free

10. Call Recorder for Mac: ecamm call recorder

11. Call Recorder for PC: VodBurner

Editing Software:

12. Camtasia I’ve been a long time user of this software, first on PC and now on Mac. There are a lot of tutorial videos and you’ll be up and running in no time.

13. ScreenFlow (Mac) I hear great things about ScreenFlow and had I not already invested in Camtasia I would have used it.

14. Jing  Is a great free alternative to both Camtasia and ScreenFlow by the folks at TechSmith (who make Camtasia) and you can record up to to 5 minutes.

15.  iMovie (Mac) Got a Mac? Well this comes with and is easy to edit video.

16. Audacity: Edit your audio recordings- a wealth of tutorials available online if you get stuck.

17. GarageBand (Mac)

18. Windows Movie Maker (PC) If you’re on PC you can download it for free, if you don’t have it already. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the higher end products like Camtasia, it gets the job done.

Upload Your Audio/Video

19. online file sharing serviceAfter you’ve created your video or audio content, you can upload it to your site directly or use a site Dropbox and then share/embed a link. I love Dropbox and the fact that I can seamlessly share and access files from anywhere.

20. For video you can upload your content and make it private on Vimeo and then embed on your site.


Product Idea: Email Course

email marketing mailchimp

21. Mailchimp:  Want to create an email course (for example a 7 day challenge?) Sign up for Mailchimp and use the autoresponder series. I tell you that Mailchimp monkey has a special place in my heart..an email marketing that has a sense of humor and easy to use? Win in my books!

Outsourcing

Don’t have a creative  or techy bone in your body? Or need help formatting and putting together your ebook (or anything for that matter?) Outsource, baby! You can use sites like

22. Elance Submit your project needs and sit back while the proposals flood your inbox. 

Warning: You can potentially get a lot of bids and probably don’t need to look at them all before you make a selection. If it’s a one-off project be sure to look at past work, references, portfolio. If it’s for an ongoing project, I recommend starting with a small test project to get a feel for how you work together.

23. Odesk: Same as above.

24. Fiverr As the name implies, five bucks will get you pretty much anything. It can be hit or miss but there are a lot of things you can get done at this price that can save you tons of time (and headache).


Graphics

Need graphics for your product? Stockphotos to the rescue!

Screen Shot 2013-09-18 at 6.01.20 PM25. istockphotos (paid)

26. 123rf  (paid)

27. Pixabay (free)

Or create and edit your own graphics

28. Pixlr

29. PicMonkey: Seriously, LOVE this site. You can jazz  up pretty much anything and have fun while doing it. I did a post that walks you through a few different sites that help you create image posts.


Selling Your Digital Goods And Services

30. Show me the money!

Fortunately, sites like Paypal,make it super-easy for you to start offering your services and get paid for them! Paypal is widely used and online payment service paypalpretty straight-forward to setup. Once you’ve created your account, add your products/services and choose the type of buttons you want to create (e.g Buy Now or Add to Cart). Paypal will generate the code you need to embed on your webpage. You can also take recurring monthly payments using Paypal.

31. E-Junkie

Now that you’ve created that ebook but need a way to deliver it? While Paypal is the go-to site for sending/receiving money, they don’t offer product delivery. So unless you want to manually email each person that buys your product, you’ll need to use a site like E-junkie to deliver your product. E-Junkie integrates with Paypal and provides the code necessary to add to your webpage.


Create An Interest List

Start building an interest list before your product is ready. Use out of the box landing page apps and drive people to sign up to your early-bird list.  This should be done in parallel to your product creation. You don’t have to wait for it to be on sale to get the word out and start promoting it.

Recommend Tools:create landing pages easily

32. SeedProd: Lets you collect email address and work in maintenance mode on your website. WordPress plugin. (one time fee).

33. LaunchRock: Set up landing pages in minutes, either on your own self-hosted website or directly on Launchrock.


Build Buzz

Use social media to connect with your audience and get the word out about your upcoming product launch.

Recommended Tools:pay with a tweet

34. Hootsuite There is a free and pro version. The free should be perfect if you are just getting started.

35. ClickToTweet: create tweetables to help your content spread

36. Pay With A Tweet: Want to give away your content for free and spread the word? Use Pay With A Tweet to spread your content to new audiences.

And there you have it. The tools you need to take that idea to launch. Let’s do it!

I’d love to hear in the comments below what you plan on launching and if you have a favorite tool that I may have missed!

Sign up below to get the entire series delivered in ebook format (for free*).

*does not include cupcakes

8 Time Saving Social Media Tools For A Product Launch

Guest post By Jen Havice

Whether you are launching a new product or a service online, being efficient with your time and resources are a must. There’s so much to do and inevitably not enough hours in the day to get things done. Using social media to work for you is the key.

Have Your Ducks In A Row Ahead Of Time

Get your systems in place and tested well before your launch date. Chances are you might end up feeling a bit overwhelmed no matter how well you’ve planned things out. If you’re scrambling just to keep up with your regular influx of emails, think about how stressed out you’ll be remaining full steam ahead when it’s crunch time.

  • Get familiar with a management system such as Hootsuite. It allows you to post across several different social media channels from one hub. It’s free up to five profiles. The best part is that you can pre-schedule to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ along with a few others. Plus, it’s an easy way to look at several profiles quickly to see who has been sharing your content and interacting with you.

  • Think about implementing a way to organize the content for your blog. A launch is not the time to abandon adding fresh content to your site. If you have a WordPress website, installing plugins that keep content writing on task can be a lifesaver. There is the Cleverness To Do List plugin which allows for the creation of an internal To Do list that can be shared between multiple users. The WP Editorial Calendar plugin provides a post overview of your blog with the ability to drag and drop pending posts to different dates. This makes it a lot easier to know where the content holes are by the week and month.

Be Interactive Not Reactive

Knowing what people are saying about you and your products are a good idea at all times. During a launch, it’s a critical time to engage with your target market by responding to questions or comments made via social media.

  • Whether it’s launch time or not, having search queries set up on Google Alerts makes good business sense. Google Alerts allow you to monitor the Internet to see who and what is being said about you, your product, service or competitors. Depending on your need, you can receive an email immediately, once a day or once a week.

  • Mention.net works in a similar way to Google Alerts but seems to be far more powerful. It does a far better job of finding mentions across the social media platforms and you can look at all your mentions in one place. It’s free for up to 3 alerts and 500 mentions per month.

Keep The Content Stream Alive

Encouraging the people buying your product to share your message and help promote you never should leave your radar screen. With everything else that needs to be managed it can be tough not only to come up with snippets of great shareable content but ways of getting others to do it for you.

  • Click To Tweet is a handy little tool that generates a custom link of whatever tweet you want to create. When someone clicks on the link, the message automatically gets added to that person’s Twitter status box. Basically, it creates a ready made retweet of whatever you want shared.

  • Graphics are always a great way of getting attention. Between Facebook and Pinterest, image quotes have become one of the most shareable pieces of content. However, spending any significant amount of time putting them together rarely makes much sense. Using either Quozio or Recite This makes short order of creating this kind of content. Quozio has a bookmarklet that when clicked will bring up a box on top of whatever web page you are looking at. This makes it extremely easy to highlight and paste whatever you want.

  • Quozio.com

    You don’t need to be everywhere at once. Be where your customers are and make your message count.@jenhavice http://bit.ly/12g5r2u    Click to Tweet

Give some of these a try and see what works for you. They may help implementing a launch a little less daunting and a whole lot more enjoyable.

jenJen Havice is a forty-something blogger, writer, and social media consultant. When not helping small businesses navigate the social networking jungle or writing commentary for her humor blog, she chases after two large dogs and rides an even larger horse. She and her husband call Minneapolis home.

 

 

 
TechTrainingVault

{How To} Bulk Schedule Tweets On Hootsuite

In this short video we look at how to bulk schedule tweets in Hootsuite using the bulk uploader. This is especially useful if you are planning a product launch and want to schedule out a whole bunch of posts. It takes some time to setup the file but sure beats having to do it manually!

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