Advanced Searching - Who would believe you could do that?

Greetings,
I hope your writing, promoting and building of your social media platform is going well.
Keep the creative flow in your writing. Don't let the flame flicker and die. It's so hard to get going once it is snuffed out through the cacophony of life or inattention. Without your creative gift released into the world, we are all less. Without your craft, there is nothing for you to promote and no reason to build a platform from which to disseminate your work.

If all you want is activity on social media for social media's sake, you can do that. But, as an author or marketer, there is a greater purpose to it all. If you spend countless hours pushing tweets and facebook posts and responding to same, your flame may flicker and die as you lose any room for any real creative flow of your gift.

But, if you are interested in becoming proficient, effective and productive in your efforts. If you desire to build not just a large number of followers, but ones that are interested in the things you are interested in; Followers that will engage in conversation, share their lives and work and in turn you share theirs, synergy will happen and an organic growth of engaged followers and friends.

To accomplish this though, you will need help. By help, I don't mean turning your account over to a BOT that will retweet your followers posts while you sleep, leaving you with nearly no original content. Now, you will have lots of time, but no engagement, only a big fat worthless account. And, the help that I absolutely refuse is buying followers. The proliferation of offers to sell thousands of followers for a few dollars tells me people are buying... It would be like paying people to hang out with you, and then bragging about how many friends you have. Would they care? Would they share? What is that relationship really worth.

Okay, back to the help. We need sincere, informed help to accomplish real growth and engaged relationships. My help is Hootsuite, a Social Media Management System. To make it very clear, I am not a Hootsuite employee. I am an unpaid volunteer Brand ambassador. I feel so strongly about Hootsuite being the most comprehensive and best performing system that I find it a pleasure to promote the brand.

A system could be the greatest in the world, but useless if you are not trained in its features. In comes Hootsuite University. Thanks to Hootsuite they offer a comprehensive social media education that not only trains you in the Hootsuite Dashboard, but best practices and social media strategies.
Through Hootsuite University, I became a Certified Professional. Give it a try, in the first thirty days free trial you can become an expert and up the level of your game. After the trial period, the cost is $21.00 per month. Invaluable.

Besides teaching you all the features of the Hootsuite Dashboard, which is powerful and extensive to say the least. Hootsuite University offers courseware and video teachings to up your game and your career.

The one video and course segment I most valued was 'Advanced Listening.' I learned how to create streams that filter out what people are talking about, when and where they are talking about it. If I want to know all the people talking about coffee within, say, five miles of my home, I can have a search stream for that. Of course, that is only an example. I can then engage these people in conversations about my product, book or campaign.

The single most valuable feature of the Hootsuite platform is bulk scheduling. I can send up to 350 posts at one time to each account I have.

Also, powerful apps within Hootsuite bring me top notch content I can share through my accounts.

It is difficult to hold back and not keep going, but both our dinners are growing cold.
Please check my other posts that cover some of these things in more depth.

Have you seen Owly? Hoot! Hoot!

Hootsuite Certified Professional

The Three Stages of Building Social Community

These and many others are things I learned from Hootsuite University

Browse my other posts and you'll find still others with great tips on using social media.

Peace,
Mike



If you'd like to leave a comment and find the form tedious you can comment on my twitter feed @mikeyznsacto or Facebook M. Matheson

The Proof in the Pudding

This post was originally posted back in September 2014. Many people found it useful, at least those indie authors and others that are serial tweeters and marketers of their words.

I'm reposting because of its usefulness and also as the cliche, idiom or saying goes.

The proof is in the pudding. 

When I originally wrote this I talked about how I was hovering around 1800 followers. At the time I kept getting stuck at Twitter's glass ceiling for follows/follower ratios. That's no longer a problem and my best guess is that my account is legitimized not only by quantity of followers but the quality of activity and interaction... That's my guess.

Anyway, I have gone from 1800 followers then to 4400 now (7,750 by 9/8/2015 - 9,020 by 10/31/2015).  Call it bragging if you want, it's taken a lot of work and 90% of those followers are good organically grown follows. I feel pretty good about that. If you have any questions get in touch with me and I'd be happy to answer them. I have learned a lot since then, but the basics are the same.

Happy Tweeting and I hope this post helps.

~~~~0~~~~

Yeah! If you thought the title was corny, so did I,, but it's all I got. This is a follow-up to a blog post titled, Tweet Tweet which had a much nicer ring. If you skip over and check it out you'll find it was about my experience gaining Twitter followers. I reread it and it almost seems ridiculous now. The methods are solid and I never changed except for the scale got larger and I had to figure a way to cut down the time it took to keep up good relationships with an ever increasing crowd. Good relationships is what it is all about.
In that post I was all excited about gaining a hundred followers in ten days, good stuff. Since then I've seen steady gains of up to 50 a day. Like I said, same method. I'm now hovering around at 1800 followers and most of these are good home-grown followers (real people). The reason I'm hovering: Twitter has a rule that if you follow 2000 people they won't let you follow any more till you get a lot more followers and that number seems mysterious and arbitrary. Without being able to follow everyone who follows me, my growth is much slower.
Still, I thought I'd share a couple things I learned to make the work less time consuming. I know that I could pay a monthly fee for a company to do all my posting, but somehow that just felt disingenuous. I couldn't bring myself to do it. For a while, I let JustUnFollow send auto DM messages thanking new followers but after getting a bunch from other people, I couldn't stomach it any longer.
My biggest help is the Hootsuite platform which allows me to schedule up to 350 Tweets or Facebook posts. I can put all the info in a correctly formatted Excel spreadsheet (simple they even give you an example to copy) and voila I have the next weeks Tweets all set to go. I set all my posts at half past the hour so if I want to post anything else, I insert it at the hour or fifteen or forty-five after so it won't get crowded.
I value all my followers old and new and some of those I schedule their book links several times in my bulk uploads. As for my new followers: after the initial nice thank you Tweet and a retweet of something for them, I wait a few days or a week and gang up all the new ones in messages thanking them again. They get a mention and I usually get a retweet with more exposure.
Ganging them up in Tweets got time-consuming when they were coming in hot and heavy 100-220 in a  three to four-day span.
Thank you Mighty Google! I went searching for a program that might do it for me... I didn't find one that would do it all for me without relinquishing my sovereignty, but I did find an excel spreadsheet that you can register as an app with Twitter and it will feed you all your followers in a neat little list, newest at top. Martin Hawksey God bless him has made it fairly easy for the average Joe to accomplish. Now I run this spreadsheet every few days and give all my new followers a mention.

The Tweets get thrown all around multiple times which is good for everyone. All I had to do was paste that list into a notepad and put little @ symbols in front of each screen name. Way better than before but tedious. So, I gained a follower @tianyuxu1 who is an Excel Guru Data Cruncher and I DM'd him and asked if he would help me with the formula to add text(the @ symbol before each name) to the contents of a cell. He was only too happy to help. Wango Tango it's now as easy as 1-2-3 to put together the thank you tweets.
I could go on but it's getting late. If anyone has something to add or comment please do. I'm no expert but I am good at learning.
Peace All,
Mike
If you'd like to leave a comment and find the form tedious you can comment on my twitter feed @mikeyznsacto or Facebook/M. Matheson

Hootsuite Certified Professional

I’m happy to announce that I recently completed the very educational HootSuite University Pro Certification course – and now am a HootSuite Certified Professional! I have used HootSuite for quite a while and thought I was already well versed. I discovered many new great features that I was unaware of – such as search, keywords, geolocation tools and analytics. I wasn’t even close! If you are a serious social media marketer, consider Hootsuite University. It will up your social media marketing game. You do have to be a Pro level member ($9.99 per month) to access the advanced features that are discussed in the course. Click here to learn more. If you'd like to leave a comment and find the form tedious you can comment on my twitter feed @mikeyznsacto or Facebook M. Matheson