Here are some changes you might test to see how they affect your social blogging results:

1. When a visitor arrives, one of the first social networking features they should see is a Feedburner subscription icon …
2. And they should immediately see (prominently displayed) your “About” page and contact info. Many visitors will leave in a hurry if they can’t quickly see who you are.
3. Remove clutter from your sidebars, such as “Recent posts” and “Recent comments” modules - both are wasted space, potentially distracting visitors from your social blogging content. The fewer distractions, the easier it is for the visitor to simply scroll down your homepage posts.
4. Have a manageable category list - maybe a dozen categories. People get overwhelmed by those huge category lists you find on some blogs.
5. If you have a “Reviews” module (visitor reviews of your blog), feature it prominently.
6. Feature “Best of the Blog”, your all-time classic reader-loved posts.
7. To make your blog the most “social marketing-friendly”, test displaying just the first few sentences of a post with a “More …” link. Visitors who click your social media buttons will then be bookmarking a single article, which is a much more effective traffic-generator than bookmarking the blog homepage.
8. Effective social blogging requires a good headline swipe file to help create strong blog post headlines. (Search “headline swipe file” if you don’t already have a good one.)
9. Displaying a good eye-catching, related image will usually increase readership of any blog post.
10. Test writing less frequently, but offering longer, more detailed posts … maybe “Top Twenty” lists. These types of post are popular with many of the social media users.

These are some creative tests that long-time bloggers have used to improve their social blogging results.

LinkedIn Status is a pretty simple idea. It’s a feature that allows you to inject more personality into your profile, and it’s been available on other social networking platforms for a long time. But this is a noteworthy upgrade, because LinkedIn is such a widely-used tool.

It’s a relationship thing. LinkedIn wants to make it easy to see at a glance what your network is doing. The more frequently you update your LinkedIn Status, the more attention you are obviously paying to networking, and the more social networking - worthy you become.

And what do you say in your updates? What is important to your network? What questions do they ask? What news and blogs do they read? when you update your Status, focus on these thoughts and others that provide value to your connections, and your LinkedIn network will get stickier.

It’s simple. Go to your LinkedIn profile. You’ll see a link to enter your status, under your name. Chris Richman, Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, has made a YouTube video describing how to use LinkedIn Status & other social networking features. To watch, click here:

LinkedIn Status Video

The recruitment website Milkround.com recently surveyed 500 students and graduates about their use of the social networking websites MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. Results:

• Facebook: 97% of the 500 respondents use it; 93% of respondents favor it
• MySpace: 44% use it
• Bebo: 23% use it

Grads and students were asked to rate the 3 social networking websites on a 1 to 5 scale for

• Contact with friends
• Photo & video sharing
• New relationships
• Social planning
• Networking for jobs
• Overall entertainment

Overall Ratings:

• Facebook: 3.5
• MySpace: 2.3
• Bebo: 1.7

Interesting Results:

1. Only 6% of the students & grads have used their Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo profile in a job search. Overwhelmingly, these sites are used strictly for social networking.
2. 82% of respondents use privacy settings, restricting who can view their profile. Half of these use the most restrictive privacy setting.

MOST Interesting Result:

Results of this survey indicate how difficult it would be for another social networking utility to take market share from Facebook, MySpace, & Bebo. Only 19% said they might switch to a new site with a bunch of whizz-bang gizmos. These students and grads made their original choice of favorite site because that’s where their friends are. A majority would ONLY change if their friends did, and most of these prefer not to change at all, having already invested time & emotion in building their profile.

“Despite suffering its first drop in traffic following 17 months of successive increases since July 2006 in January, Facebook is still immensely popular among students and graduates. It’s clearly ahead of its competitors in terms of staying in contact with friends and sharing files online, Bebo and MySpace will need to improve their usability to come close to toppling the Facebook dominance. However, all of the major three sites would benefit if they could encourage users to meet new people or even think of ways to help users find a job.” - Milkround.com spokesman Mike Barnard

Here’s a social marketing plan to build your brand on the social bookmarking and social networking websites:

1. Be there or be square. The value of social media is in the relationships. Online relationships are just like offline relationships. If you aren’t there, you have no relationship. If you work at finding friends for 5 days, then go away for 6 weeks and come back, it’s not the same. You can’t just pick up right where you left off. That’s not how “social” works, online or offline.

You have to apply consistent, day-to-day attention, or you’ll just waste your time. And the more consistent you are, the more you remind people of your brand. Your market can potentially find you through every action you do. So be active on the social marketing websites. Every action you take opens the door for people to connect with your website or your blog or you.

2. Speaking of consistent - if you want to use the social media, it’s good to REALLY learn a handful of social bookmarking or social networking sites. Choose the same username for each. This increases your presence, gets you more notice, makes you more … social. If you want to promote your blog, maybe you focus on Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Start out by targeting 10 minutes a day on each, and do it. Keep a consistent message across all your social marketing profiles, consistent voice, style, topics you cover, avatar, etc. Doing this reinforces both your image and your brand.

3. Support the entire StumbleUpon community … or whichever sites you focus on. If you spend time on a forum, you’ll sometimes hear the guests grouse about the “drive-bys”. Those are the forum visitors who post once about whatever it is they’re promoting and then disappear for months … until they post about the next thing they’re promoting. They add no value to the group. They have no sense of community. They are looked on as scum by the “residents”. It’s tempting to just promote yourself. Millions of people use these sites. But what actually happens is, people take more notice of you when you become a useful social marketing resource. And that entices other social networkers to share your blog and speed up your popularity. If all you ever do is point to yourself, those others won’t participate as much.

4. Ride the “social” wave. If you do the first 3 items on this list, then you will have put yourself in position for #4. When your social marketing appears consistently across several social media and you demonstrate your desire to give people the best results possible when they search your niche, you will build a following.

And, of course, that’s why you joined most of these social marketing sites in the first place.

The aspect of LinkedIn with the greatest leverage is the ability to connect quickly (and sometimes emotionally) with powerful centers of influence whom you’ve never met. A strong social networking connection with the right person could change your life forever … maybe a lot of lives.

Bill Gates has asked a question at LinkedIn:

“How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?”

Wouldn’t it be worth your while - and fun, too! - to plan a continuing strategy of connecting with the movers and shakers in your field? Forum communities offer a lot of opportunities. Every social networking platform has its “big dogs.” How might it affect your future if your thoughtful contribution at LinkedIn Answers captured the imagination of one of the top people in your field?

It happens every day. Someone makes a quantum leap because they suddenly connected to someone who is REALLY connected. And as you make those efforts at LinkedIn and at forum communities or other social networking hotspots, you will get better and better at the strategy. As you read the responses of others who use the same strategy, you’ll get more of an idea of how to focus your response to strengthen your contribution.

Do you think Bill Gates will read these answers at LinkedIn? I’ll bet he does. Do you think a ton of other well-connected people will participate and also read these answers? I’ll bet they do. So here is just one of many social networking chances you have to leap-frog your competition. Answer Bill Gates’ LinkedIn question and REALLY nail it!

Answer Bill Gates’ Question

There was a time when having a good social marketing network was a great asset. Today, it’s a 100% necessity. You can be certain your competition is constantly using online resources to build their own strong, experienced, knowledgable, wise, nimble network. With today’s avalanche of information heading your way, you’d better have not only a great network, but also a great way to quickly sample lots of good stuff, or you will spend your life sorting through garbage.

Tumblr.com is a micro-blogging utility. The idea is to build a social network of connoisseurs who pick through the information smorgasbord, delivering you only the tastiest snacks.

You have the option to host this social blogging platform on your own domain. You can use Tumblr to quickly post small bites of text, pictures, audio, video, & links. It’s similar to Twitter. Every person in your social network becomes your own personal editor, constantly focusing on content to publish only targeted key points, deciding this resource is important and that one is not. Then YOU glance at each thumbnail and instantly decide whether to look deeper.

Similar to the idea of the Blog Marketing Journal - but much shorter.

This is as easy and quick as social networking gets. You don’t even have to go to the Tumblr website. Just click on a toolbar icon to post a quote, picture, content, etc. You can even post content from mobile phones. It’s perfect for a large segment of the population that doesn’t want to spend their time writing a detailed blog post.

You can also feature as many as 5 RSS feeds, which means you can leverage the time you put into your social blogging. Tumblr is well-positioned to help solve your information overload problem, while making social networking much more productive for you.

LinkedIn helps solve a big problem. Most of us have companies to promote and products to promote, and that’s what we do. But more and more, people are seeing that companies and products come and go. Not knowing the future, your best long-term strategy is to take charge of your future. Effectively promote yourself whenever you have the chance.

Some productive ways to use LinkedIn:

1. Create a professional LinkedIn resume to put you in position for new career opportunities you would never have found otherwise. Your LinkedIn profile is a social networking tool that can prospect for you while you work and while you sleep. Every minute of every day, your face and credentials and achievements and testimonials are there for others to see.

2. Get a streamlined evaluation of prospects for your projects. A LinkedIn profile gives you a quick idea of the person’s background, profession, current job, work history, connections, entrepreneurial inclinations, and so forth.

3. Use LinkedIn as a constantly self-updating social networking Rolodex. Not only can you keep track of all your connections, but they certainly keep their own contact information current. If you have a lot of contacts, your own files no doubt are out of date. LinkedIn can solve a big part of that problem.

4. Seek out past employers, co-workers and other close contacts for a digital recommendation letter. (For some contacts, it’s best to write your own letter and send it to them for approval. Obviously, keep the superlatives realistic.)

5. Harness the enormous potential value in “LinkedIn Answers.” You can get response from some of the top entrepreneurs and professionals in your field on any question. They are on LinkedIn to build their network & credibility, so they have reason to give you their best answers. This is way different from asking a question on some forum where you don’t have a clue who the person is that’s answering, or their experience or credentials.

Other social networking sites come and go, but LinkedIn is a rock where serious professionals actively network. Use your LinkedIn profile as part of your long-term plan for social marketing.

“I’ve found headlines with numbers tend to produce more clicks, and longer headlines tend to produce less. Also my recent post titled “Weekend Fight & A Birthday Party” did well, I can only assume it’s due to curiosity. ‘What was the fight about?’”
Michelle MacPhearson
Social Marketing

Twenty years ago, the top direct marketers told you that your headline only had 7 seconds to capture a person’s attention. Today, in the internet social marketing age, you probably have half that time to attract a reader. Let’s say you’ve got 4 seconds to pull in your targeted social networker. How do you do that?

A few social blogging headline tips:

• Good titles are direct. They tell the reader exactly what benefit they’ll get from reading your blog post.
• Or - good titles arouse curiousity. You’ve hit the mark if you can get your reader to say, “Heck! What is THIS all about?” They have to read your post to find out.
• Better yet - really good titles do both.
• A specific number adds credibility to your title.
• Use strong action verbs to help spark an interest that gets the reader to read your blog post
• Don’t forget your SEO benefits. Your primary keyword needs to be in the title - the earlier, the better.
• Your post itself must have insightful, useful, valuable information. If you trick a social networker into wasting their time reading drivel, you have lost them forever.

If you do these things in every blog title you write, then you will write titles that get people to read your blog posts. To make that easier on yourself, focus on exactly who your target audience is. Then use a title structure to more effectively rivet social networker attention.

When writing a title, even if you don’t care about the SEO benefits, you should always have your keyword list open and visible. Those keywords are hot buttons for your targeted social blogging market. Use 1 or 2 of these keywords in your title to help pull your reader into your post..

A simple way to ensure that you get the social blogging keyword right up front and that you write a good title is to make the keyword your first word, followed by a colon. Then write a short title that follows the other principles.

A little practice can get you a big payoff. Get out your keyword list. Go to your MySpace page and click through some of the profiles. Notice 2 things: the line under the person’s name (on the left) and the first line of the “blurb” (on the right). These are critical titles - which most people waste. You know you want to create a magnet profile, so use your social blogging keyword list to improve each title to do that.

The more you practice, the more effective your own blog headlines will be.

Obviously, you want to maximize the social networking value of your blog. For that to happen, your blog content needs to be fresh and enticing and insightful and most of all, targeted to your market’s most passionate desires. If you do these things, they’ll keep coming back … and they’ll tell their friends.

But how do you get them there in the first place?

You do that by creating good entry points. One blogger calls it “Hansel and Gretel Marketing” (leaving crumbs around to help others find your blog). Your goal is to ultimately have your readers create these links themselves.

Until that happens, you need to be the one dropping crumbs in all the right places:

• Create really useful and thoughtful blog posts, then request a link from the top blogs in your niche.
• Guest-write a post now and then (best: feature a market-specific use of social networking) for other high-traffic blogs.
• Learn and use some basic Search Engine Optimization for your blog.
• Set up social marketing profiles at StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, etc., and link to your blog in your profile.
• One idea that can easily go viral on the social networking media is a resource list. If you know exactly what your target market wants and needs, spend time creating a special blog post where you give them a resource list. This is exactly the type of post that can get you featured on StumbleUpon or Digg or other social bookmarking sites.

You can also comment on other blogs or forums in your topic and leave your blog url. But to do this consistently takes many, many hours a week. It’s probably more time-effective to invest a few hours creating that ONE special blog post that really optimizes your social network marketing.

BlogCatalog.com, the social blog directory, is putting the finishing touches on a new tool that will, on a single page, automatically cross-network and promote to your friends - and maybe their friends - all your social networking interests. Result? A realistic chance to go viral every time you Digg a new blog article or post a video to YouTube.

BlogCatalog’s new dashboard will be like the ultimate social network RSS feed. You will instantly get the social networking activities of all your friends … and they will get yours.

The new social blogging dashboard automatically:

• Displays your latest activities across social networks like Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others.
• Posts your profile updates, Digg submissions, Twitter comments, etc., right to your friends’ Dashboard - and maybe their friends, also, giving you a headstart on viral marketing.
• Energizes your profile page, causing other bloggers to return again and again.
• Streamlines your social networking, so you accomplish much more in much less time.

This viral social marketing tool was conceived to be the “dream team” of social blogging time-savers, taken from the wishlist of some of the top bloggers online. We’ll report on it again, as soon as it goes live.

“Googling” is everywhere. We’ve all heard of employees getting fired - or applicants not hired - because of their Facebook or MySpace profile. And when you search for a potential employer, you might find a list of lawsuits, complaints and “IHateAcme.com” websites. Or you might find a list of company press releases. Either way, there’s a good chance what you find will influence your impression.

To monitor that “you” brand:

1. Set up Google Alerts for your name
2. Check Technorati regularly for your name in blogs
3. Check Google Video for your name in videos

How can you help make sure that your “YOU” brand shows up positively & accurately?

Don’t reveal everything to the world in your social networking profiles or on your blogs. Think what you would want to find in the social media if you were hiring “you”. Then create a professional profile to match for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

Register “yourname.com”, if it’s available. If not, get the .net domain or .org or one of the others. Set up a blog, if you don’t have one, with this domain name. Anyone who links will probably use your name for anchor text. Your blog can link to your Facebook profile, or YouTube video, or Flickr photos, etc. You can write up a bio for your “About me” page & link to a resume.

Link from your blog to your articles posted online, and to the positive pages created about you. Be sure to go to Digg & StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites to bookmark these pages.

Whenever you put something online, remind yourself: “This is eternal.” Because it pretty much is.

You don’t need to do all this reputation management today. But long-range, this plan will strengthen that brand of “YOU.”

You can post and share your photos on Flickr, a website that Alexa ranks in the Top 40 for internet traffic. The “photo sharing” part is what makes Flickr such a hot social networking site.

A couple of strategies to get the most bang for your buck with Flickr:

1. Be sure to create a relationship-building profile, so social networkers can connect and bond with you. If you want to use Flickr to promote your “WidgetsRUs” business, tell them about you and tell them what you love about widgets. Link to your website and to your email. Use some part of one of your photos to make an icon to identify you on Flickr.

2. The photos you upload from your camera to your computer have some worthless gobbledegook jpg name. Change your photo name to “BestWidget.jpg”. Now the Search Engines can index your photo with a term that people are actually likely to search. And as you share this photo with other social networkers, encourage them to use their Flickr option of applying their own comments and tags to it. That will get you more Search Engine love.

Two simple strategies. Do the first and be consistent with the second, and you improve your social networking results from Flickr.

Every day you see new online gizmos and offline gadgets that put more power in the hands of consumers. A consumer can find your website this morning, subscribe, have some annoying experience which may or may not have been your fault, focus their anger in a quickie audio & video commentary, edit it, post it, bookmark it, link to it, and by tonight it could have been seen and/or read by tens of thousands of people. By tomorrow? It could go viral, and the universe will have seen it.

Today’s social networking media has created a world of Walter Cronkites. (If you’re under 30, he used to be on TV.)

What can you do to prepare for all of today’s new scrutiny? Some reputation management tips:

1. Listen to what consumers are saying. Use tools that allow you to find and recognize problems quickly, before someone uploads their investigative video. Monitor talk about your brand. Be sure to subscribe to daily newsfeeds for your brand and your keywords. A lot of sudden activity means you need to look more closely.

2. Consumer-reporters are out there 24/7 looking for material. Number one on their list is exposing bad customer service. Since it’s everywhere, bad customer service is easy to find. So improve your customer service, and let the bloodhounds sniff some other trail.

3. Make all your public communications as consumer-focused as possible. Talk about what you hear in #1 above. When people know you are listening to them, they are way less likely to attack.

They are watching you. With a few low-cost tools, anyone could be a professional spy. So guard your reputation. It’s good business sense to tweak your marketing plan to give your public the best possible experience in every area of your business. Don’t give the spies anything to talk about. Who knows? A good reputation management plan may cause some consumer/reporter to fall in love with you and upload their “good vibrations” video about your company. It does happen.

You can build a valuable social marketing network on MySpace by doing the right things … and by not doing the wrong things.

For example … take a look at the MySpace comments on any profile with a lot friends. Almost certainly, over 50% of the comments are, “Thanks for the add.” So in the first interaction with their new MySpace friend, over half of humanity yells out the exact same words. The reader pays no attention, because they see these same words over and over and over.

Why not just write, “Hi. I have ZERO creativity!” or “You are no one special to me!” Why even bother?

People want recognition and validation. They want to be in the “in” group so they’ll know they are popular. But at the same time, they want to feel like they’re unique, one-of-a-kind.

When you add a MySpace comment to someone’s profile, you have an opportunity to create a big impression by delivering on one of these most basic human desires. Not only that … all over this comments section - before YOURS! - are people who can’t think of anything more intimate to say than, “Thanks for the add.” You have a chance to stand out from all of them, over and above all of them.

Remember the old line, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression?” Well, this is your shot. If you say, “Thanks for the add,” then you are just one more in a long series of mind-numbed robots. If you really want to build relationships, it will take a little work, attention, and creativity.

Start with the end in mind. When you are doing social marketing, you want them to click on YOUR picture and go to your profile and read about you, because that is what will really heat up the relationship. If your comment is the same as all the others, why would anyone click on your picture?

So make yourself stand out. When you look at their profile, focus on their list of books (”To Kill a Mockingbird was my favorite, too! Did Harper Lee ever write any other books?”), movies (”Great movie list. I loved Dr. Zhivago, especially the ice castle. What did you like best?”), where they live (”Wow! My best friend is from Germany! Do you ever get to Hamburg?”), who they’d like to meet (”When you and George Clooney get together, PLEASE call me! Which of his body parts is your favorite?”), location (”My husband grew up in Cleveland. Do you ever go down to The Jake to watch the games?”), occupation, schools, their “About me” section, etc. Or anything else (”I’ve seen a lot of MySpace sites. I LOVE your design! My site just doesn’t seem as hot.”)

Find something - anything - you can connect with. Make it a positive comment about them. Show them that unlike everyone else, YOU actually care enough to have read their MySpace profile. And THEN ask a question or add another line designed to get them to click on your photo and come to your site. You don’t have to be that clever, since nobody else is giving them ANY reason to click on their picture. Just notice something about them, and comment on it.

This is a great social networking opportunity. You can easily stand out from the MySpace competition, because they all (even some of the person’s close friends) say, “Thanks for the add.” But you, whom they have never met or talked to, actually read their profile and comment favorably on it. You deliver the recognition and validation they want. That could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

Advertising may not be the best way to get new business from social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. The reality is those sites were not designed to be advertising sites. They were designed to be networking sites.

Imagine this: You are invited to a attend a free trade show in your industry. You decide to go, thinking it could be a good way to meet new people, potential business partners, and customers. When you get to the trade show, before you can walk in the door, you are bombarded with purchasing offers and come ons for products totally unrelated to your industry. The people trying to sell you their products don’t know you, they’ve never met you, they haven’t even asked you if you’re interested in the type of product they’re offering. Yet they feel the need to interrupt your focus and try to sell you something you have no need for and have no interest in.

Finally, you make your way inside the meetin. Now you can be at peace. But not so fast. You approach a table to see who is there and find out that it is run by people who are not related to your business or even have a presence in your industry. They are trying to sell you a product. You move on to the next table. It’s a booth and you make some new friends. These people are in your industry and are there for the same reasons you are. You decide to kill some time and hang out. But the moment you walk away from the table you are bombarded with offers from people in unrelated industries for products you have no desire for. Would you go back to that trade show next year?

Social networking sites are for networking. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a great place to advertise. Your best bet for getting new business at Facebook and MySpace is to set up a profile page and become a networker.   This is best for social marketing. With any luck, you’ll be able to ignore the ads.