Erich Stauffer

Tag: Social Media

  • How to Get More Followers on Peach: 5 Ways

    Peach is one of the newest and hottest social media apps, but how do you get more followers on Peach?

    How to Get More Followers on Peach

    1. Post more often

    Peach has a “friend-of-friends” feed that allows you to see what some friends of friends are posting. Appearing regularly in this feed is a great way to build up your friend list. To do that, post often.

    Why? Because each new posts brings you to the top of your friend-of-friends feed, the more friends you have, the bigger your extended network. That will likely be your biggest driver of new friends to your Peach account.

    2. Use your other social media accounts

    You probably already have an existing audience on other social media platforms to help build your Peach following. You can use those other social media platforms to ask people to follow you.

    People are looking for people to follow right now. Now is the time to build your following. This could be the next Vine. Remember to accept the people who add you and interact with everyone.

    3. Create great content

    Like any social media account, you want to create content that people actually want to see, but to get people to follow you, create exclusive content as a way to drive people from platforms like Twitter and Snapchat into Peach.

    Ideas for exclusive content could be insider photos or information that you only share on Peach or even a contest or giveaway to give people a reason to follow you there and interact with you. That brings us to engagement.

    4. Be engaged with your followers

    Like Facebook, users have “friends” on Peach and you must be friends with someone to “like” or comment on their posts. Users can also interact with each other via a multi-faceted interaction menu, similar to Facebook’s old Poke feature, friends can wave, boop and send cake to each other.

    5. Break content up into smaller chunks

    Peach encourages the easy sharing of video, images, gifs and even user-created drawings. The real differentiating factor in the app are Slack-like commands called “Magic Words”. One thing you can do to boost engagement is to break content up into 2–3 short posts instead of one longer one.

    If you have a longer post, try breaking up your posts into 2–3 sections. This lets you appear more times in the feed and thus fuels the “friend-of-friends” feed mentioned in point number 1: Post more often. Happy Peaching!

    You can follow me on peach @erichstauffer. See you there.

  • On Facebook Acquisitions, Predicting the Future, and Messaging

    In the book, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, I learned that people aren’t very good at predicting the future, but they are okay at predicting the next thing. Our brains just aren’t wired to take 2 steps at once, but we can make 1 step + 1 more step fairly easily. Because this explanation sounds dumb, you know that it’s true. Let me give you an example from the book:

    Hand a person a box of tacks, a book of matches, and a candle. Ask them to mount the candle on the wall.

    Most people first start by making a shelf of tacks on the wall and then attempting to mount the candle on the shelf. Once they realize the box is empty and they see the shelf they think: I can use the box as a shelf and they correctly mount the box to the shelf with the tacks and put the candle in the box.

    Facebook bought Oculus Rift. Facebook bought Whatsapp.

    Months later we are just now seeing how those first steps are leading to the next steps. Oculus Rift lets people experience virtual worlds with other, real people in real-time. Whatsapp is a messenger platform. Facebook is a social media platform, which also features a heavy game element and already had Messenger. Messaging is already a bigger platform worldwide than social media and is set to grow. Gaming platforms like Steam, Xbox Live, and Battle.net are likely where Facebook is headed with their VR set, but I’m guessing they will have a live-meeting aspect as well.

    I’m rambling now. I don’t know anything. Here’s what I know:

    When I was young I used to have a third place to call my own. It was called “The Blue Lounge“. When that was threatened, I built an outdoor Blue Lounge. When that was taken away, I kept looking. I kept looking for a place that I could meet my friends and have a conversation. I dreamed of a day where I could virtually sit in a room with people just like I could back in the Blue Lounge. Now that day may be approaching.

    But what about coffee?

    I hear you. Get coffee together when you can. We’re not animals. Get out of your storage shed, onto your motorbike, and get down to The Raft to be with other people now and again. It’s good for you – and you just might save the world.

  • How to Get Started as a Freelance Marketer

    Recently I got asked how to start freelancing doing marketing with a focus on social media, email marketing, and blogger outreach:

    Hey Erich! So I’m trying to venture out on my own with freelance marketing specially focusing on social media, email marketing and blogger outreach. Joy mentioned you might be able to give me some tips on how you got your clients so I thought I would ask!!

    Yeah, I agree with Joy. That’s a great idea. When I first started all I had was a website and that worked for a while, but that’s not enough anymore. You’ll have to be much more direct.

    I’d recommend identifying the type of customer you’d like to work for, something very specific you can do for them, and then be laser-focused on contacting them.

    For example, let’s say you wanted to sell your services to a business owner you know. You ask around, search the Internet, and you find their email address. Then you upload it to Facebook as a custom audience and make an ad that only appears on their Facebook feed.

    Another approach is to start to tell people stories about how you solved a problem and that you’re looking for other people to help in the same way. Use these stories on your website and in conversations with people you meet.

    That brings us to the third leg: networking. Find out where your customers meet outside of work and go there. Get involved. Tell your story. Offer value upfront. Give your best ideas away for free. If you have enough ideas, write a book down (10-40k words is enough) and have it printed at createspace.com. Now you’re an expert. You wrote a book on the subject.

    Host a live teaching event and charge people to show up. This is not to make money, but to show that your time is valuable and to filter out people who don’t have money.

    Lastly, there are lists where you can sign up to bid on marketing jobs such as thumbtack.com. Hope that helps.

    If you liked this post you might also like, How to Learn to Become a Blogger.

  • How to Get More Followers on Periscope: 5 Ways

    Periscope is the new video streaming service from Twitter. It lets you stream video live from your smartphone to anyone with the app or via their website (if published).

    But how do you get more viewers to watch your Periscopes?

    1. Make a title that intrigues people to watch (definitely don’t leave it blank)
    2. Make sure the “Twitter Post” icon is selected when you’re starting a new Periscope
    3. Encourage or incentivize people to like the Periscope by tapping the screen
    4. Follow more people on Periscope. Like Twitter, they may follow you back
    5. Instead of making it public, choose the private option and invite specific people to watch

    Periscope Followers

    How can brands use Periscope for marketing?

    • Have a celebrity “take over” the company Periscope for a live broadcast
    • Showcase company culture & the people behind the brand
    • Live Q&A sessions and instant feedback
    • Sneak peeks and teasers
    • Build and interact with community

    How are you using Periscope? Got any tricks or tips for use? It’s still a relatively new program so I’m sure there will be more new features and announcements to come, but for now, get as big a following as you can!

  • How to Market Your Business in Less than 15 Minutes a Day

    I realize that not every business owner can afford to hire a full-time marketing person or spend a lot of time marketing themselves so I’ve created this guide that shows you how to spend the next two weeks taking small, bite-size steps towards marketing your business online.

    Day 0: Sign up for Instagram and fill out your profile with a short description and add your URL and picture. Post your first picture with relevant keywords as hashtags. Click on each of the hashtags you just added to your image and begin liking and commenting.

    Day 1: Take photos of your product or service. Take some as standalone images (just the product/service with a cutaway background) and in context (show it being used in some form or against a relevant background).

    Day 2: Post one the images you took on day 1 to Instagram. Add some hashtags. Click on the hashtags and like/comment on other people’s posts.

    Day 3: Create a blog post about how to do something with your product or how it solves a need or problem your potential customer might have.

    Day 4: Create an ad campaign on Bing Ads or Google Adwords to point back to the blog post, which points back to the product/service on your website.

    Day 5: Post more of the pictures from Day 1 on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. You are now out of pictures and need to take more.

    Day 6: Take more pictures of your product or service being used. Be sure to include people’s faces, not just objects. People love to see people.

    Day 7: Go shopping for some props to use in the future when you’re taking more pictures or arrange someone to be in your pictures as a model.

    Day 8: Begin posting pictures from Day 6 and 7.

    Day 9: Research 10 relevant people to contact and store in a spreadsheet.

    Day 10: For each contact on your list, sign up for their email list, follow them on social media, comment on their blog or reply on social.

    Day 11: Choose one contact from the list to contact. Mention how you’re subscribed to their list and follow them on social. Ask them if they’d be interested in covering your product or service on their blog.

    Day 12: Review the success or failure from Day 11 and make adjustments. Choose another contact to reach out to.

    Day 13: Repeat Day 12 until all 10 people from Day 9’s spreadsheet have been contacted.

  • How I Use Instagram for Marketing

    Here’s a rough rule for using Instagram to market your product or business: 1x100x10. Post at least 1 picture, like 100 pictures, and comment on at least 10 of them – every single day.

    When adding captions to your own photo, use at least 1 relevant #hashtag, but 3 or more is better. The more hashtags you have, the more chance you have of being interacted with. This is because Instagram can only search hashtags, not text.

    How to find pictures to like?

    Know your keywords and use them to search for hashtags. Once you find a hashtag, click the ‘3 dash’ icon and scroll through liking rapid-fire. When you see a post you want to comment on, stop to comment.

    Comments aren’t just for talking to the original poster. They are also a great way to interact with other commenters – especially on a post that already has over 100 likes.

    You can add hashtags to comments on other people’s posts, but I haven’t seen this add that hashtag to Instagram’s hashtag search database. Only the original poster’s hashtags get added.

    How often should I post?

    Post at least once a day. Don’t always cross-promote on other social media channels – except for Tumblr – it’s cool because there is very little cross-over on that network.

    To cross promote to a Facebook page you manage, first add your personal Facebook account and then go back and change the setting to a page. You can do this in settings.

    You can only post from a mobile device and posts can’t be scheduled so you’ll need to get into a routine of doing it everyday.

    I do it either while I’m laying in bed in the morning, laying in bed at night, or while I’m doing something else. Want to follow me on Instagram?

  • Social Media Dashboards

    Are you still using a spreadsheet to collect your social media data? Me too. Here is how I’m trying to automate marketing analytics.

    Every morning I manually calculate metrics like the number of Shopify orders, the number of Facebook likes, and the number of Twitter followers (to name a few). I started to wonder, “How can I view all of my social media stats in one place automatically?” I wondered if there was a program or web site that would provide me the information I was looking for automatically, something like a “social media dashboard”?

    Sprout Social

    Sprout Social

    After hearing a lot of business marketing podcast guests talk about Sprout Social, I decided to check it out. It boasts, “Unlimited reporting & exporting across all of your accounts. Profile, group and roll-up reports for high or low level performance data,” in short, “Integrated analytics across all of your social properties.” While Sprout Social has the social media dashboard functionality I was looking for, at plans that start at $39 a month, I wondered if I could get that functionality elsewhere? Enter Ducksboard and Geckoboard.

    Ducksboard Dashboard

    Ducksboard

    Ducksboards are “Real time Dashboards” to “Visually monitor all your metrics at a glance.” I tested it out by loading in Google Analytics for one site, a Facebook Page, my Trello account, and my Twitter account data. The process was relatively easy and while the displayed data was slightly different than the data I was manually collecting, it did a good job of showing me a real-time “snapshot” view of what was going on. One neat feature of Duckboard dashboards is their “TV mode” feature where the data is meant to be displayed on a flat panel in your office or waiting room. Starting at $16 a month, if all you want is social dashboarding, it’s a nice alternative to Sprout Social.

    geckoboard

    Geckoboard

    Geckoboard is “Your Key Data, In One Place. Stop spending time checking services and start monitoring your business in real-time.” After using Ducksboard, Geckoboard seemed much more granular. It asked many more questions when setting up a “widget” than Ducksboard did. If you want to be more specific, use Geckoboard. Similarly, Geckoboard lets you control how big each widget is displayed, whereas Ducksboard did not. So if you’re anal retentive, use Geckoboard. As far as the dashboard view, I found Geckoboard less appealing and one of the widgets just didn’t work. Pricing is very similar to Ducksboard: it starts at $17 a month, making it a another dashboard alternative to Sprout Social.

    Summary

    One thing both Ducksboard and Geckoboard have in common is a public link to your dashboard so that you can share the information with someone without an account. This makes it easy to share with say, a client. I manage a lot of different client’s marketing campaigns as well as my own sites, so a single dashboard view wouldn’t necessarily work for me, but setting one up for each client might work. It could be a nice upsell that could potentially benefit the client, but like all information, the data is only as good as what you do with it. If you’re looking for a more detailed review, GetApp has a nice Geckoboard vs. Ducksboard review page.

    Update

    I just got an email from Matt at Geckoboard that shows how they can be used on a TV just like Duckboard:

    Hey Erich,

    It’s great to see that you’ve been adding some widgets to your Geckoboard. Now if you haven’t done so already, you should really think about getting your dashboard displayed on a big screen TV for all to see.

    2 in 3 of our customers do this and they tell us that having Geckoboard up on their wall has meant that everyone has access to this important data. It also starts conversations about data – what they’re seeing and why that might be!

    The screen is best placed where people regularly come together (we have one of our own above the water machine) and just focus on the metrics that really matter – you don’t need to display everything.

    Since you’re just starting out, you might want to get creative and add in a few fun widgets – this encourages more people to stop and look at it and as they say, nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. If you’re stuck for how get your dashboard on to a screen, then consider the following options that we blogged about recently.

    As ever, if you have any problems or questions then let me know.

    Thanks,

    Matt at Geckoboard

  • Seesmic VS Path

    A friend of mine recently started testing two social media tools, Seesmic and Path. Here is what he discovered:

    I would recommend Seesmic. It currently is free only because it is in beta. It will be a pay service when it comes out of beta.

    Pros:
    -Can post to multiple social media outlets at once (and can easily switch your mix in-message)
    -Can handle multiple iterations of the same social media platform (your can connect as many twitter, etc. accounts as you want)
    -Can schedule post and reliably deliver at the scheduled time
    -Adjusts the “Characters remaining” indicator according to the max of the minimum social media platform (i.e. it shows 5000 char remaining if just facebook and 140 if twitter is in the mix.)
    -handles photos, links, and tags accurately and intelligently
    -interface is simple, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing; good UX
    -has a “save drafts” queue

    Cons:
    -Only posts to facebook, twitter, and linkedin
    -their icon/badge (especially on facebook) looks stupid and will be on your messages viewed on the web
    -the cost of service is unknown
    -there isn’t a “pending posts” for posts that have been future dates
    -setttings management is somewhat limited on the iphone app – some things have to be done on web
    -links aren’t auto-shortened (may be too long)

    As an alternative, there is Path. Compared to Seesmic, Path’s advantages are:
    -free
    -can post to tumblr and foursquare also (but not linkedin)
    -can be used as one-stop social media manager and public-or-private quantified self tool
    -added functionality to tag with people, places, music

    As an alternative to Seesmic, Path’s disadvantages are:
    -can’t schedule posts
    -no characters remaining gauge
    -no “saved drafts” page
    -can only establish one profile per social media platform (1 facebook, 1 twitter)
    -difficult to add new profile once you have it set up

  • 20 Serial Entrepreneurs: An Analysis

    Serial entrepreneurs want to change the world and “make meaning” but successful ones also make money, and lots of it.

    Here is a list of 20 serial entrepreneurs and the companies they helped create:

    1. Andy Bechtolsheim: Sun Microsystems, Granite Systems, Arista Networks
    2. Biz Stone: Twitter, Xanga, Blogger
    3. David Duffield: PeopleSoft, Workday
    4. Dennis Crowley: Dodgeball, Foursquare
    5. Elon Musk: PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors
    6. Evan Williams: Blogger, Twitter
    7. Jack Dorsey: Twitter, Square
    8. Jason Calacanis: Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs Inc., Mahalo, Launch, OAF/TWI
    9. Jim Clark: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, MyCFO, Neoteris
    10. Kevin Rose: Digg, Pownce
    11. Marc Andreessen: Netscape, Opsware, Ning
    12. Mark Cuban: MicroSolutions, Broadcast.com, 2929 Entertainment, HDNet, Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theatres
    13. Mark Pincus: Tribe.net, SupportSoft, Zynga
    14. Max Levchin: PayPal, Slide, WePay
    15. Nick Grouf: Firefly, PeoplePC, SpotRunner
    16. Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis: Kazaa, Skype, Joost, Atomico, Rdio
    17. Scott Jones: Boston Technology, ChaCha
    18. Sean Parker: Plaxo, Napster, Facebook, Causes, Founders Fund
    19. Steve Jobs: Apple, NeXT, Pixar
    20. Wayne Huizenga: Blockbuster, Waste Management, Auto Nation

    Birds of a feather flock together

    Of the companies listed, you may have noticed some repeated names. When we sort the list by the companies with at least two serial entrepreneurs from our list, we get three companies:

    1. Twitter: Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey
    2. PayPal: Elon Musk, Max Levchin
    3. Blogger: Biz Stone, Evan Williams

    Similar Industries

    And of the companies listed, another trend emerges, which is the similarities in industries.  The companies can be narrowed down into a surprisingly small number of groups, which could be categorized as ‘Technology’ and ‘Other’, but broken we see a large amount of Web 2.0 and Entertainment companies as well as Transportation:

    1. Software: Twitter, Blogger, Xanga, PeopleSoft, Workday, Dodgeball, Foursquare, Netscape, Ning, Plaxo, Napster, Facebook, Digg, Paypal, Slide, WePay
    2. Hardware: Sun Microsystems, Arista Networks, Granite Systems, PeoplePC, Apple, NeXT
    3. Entertainment: Pixar, 2929 Entertainment, HDNet, Blockbuster, Zynga, Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theatres
    4. Transportation: SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Auto Nation

    This follows a pattern in economics called ‘barriers to entry’ of which software has the lowest barriers in terms of cost and transportation, the highest.  Hardware and entertainment, it seems, falls in the middle, which is what you would expect.  So in the future, we can probably expect more serial entrepreneurs in the software arena, probably culminating up through app makers, which has the lowest barrier of entry and the highest audience: a combination ripe for the next round of serial entrepreneurs.