The Five Free Tools of Social Media Success

Social media helped me get that global publishing contract and it helps me every day to promote my services. Here are the main five tools I use to build, manage and continuously develop my social media presence:

1. A blog. Wordpress and Blogger are both good. This blog uses blogger, a free blog creation service, and my main site uses Wordpress, another free blog creation site. Wordpress has more design themes and Blogger has a simple interface with links to Google. You decide which one you want, but get blogging.

2. Twitter. My main account @LPOBryan has over 38,000 followers. I also have a second account which has 15,000 followers and my daughter Tweets for me from @IsabelleOBryan where she has 10,000 followers. I firmly believe that each Tweet you send should have valuable content, a link to an interesting post, news for writers or a great new picture you have posted on Pinterest. Make each Tweet valuable and you will not lose followers,

3. Bufferapp.com a service which allows you to schedule Tweets, Facebook posts and LInkedIn posts. This is a real time saver. It allows me to surf the news sites, find an article I think will interest people (adventure, interesting history, writing themes are what I like to read & post about) and press a button at the top right of my browser, Chrome, and the item link is auto-posted at whatever time I have set up in buffer. This is an amazing tool. I still use the free version daily.

4. Tweetdeck. is another great free tool. Instead of us having to open Twitter for each account and check messages, follows and @Connects, each account is on screen all the time. Using Tweetdeck I can respond to everyone who mentions my Twitter name in a post, wants to ask me a question or say anything to me. Tweetdeck has transformed the way I manage multiple Twitter accounts. My goal is to reply to everyone within a few hours of them sending me a message. It also allows me to schedule Tweets & retweets for later in the day. I believe Tweets should be spread out through the day.

5. Tweepi, for adding followers every day. I can add 50 followers who might be interested in my books or social media support services in about four minutes with Tweepi. I can also unfollow people who won't follow me back and people who have stopped using Twitter. Tweepi is great for building your follower base. I see it as tapping people on the shoulder and saying "follow me back if you are interested" and then leaving them alone if they are not. I see no reason to read people's Tweets if they won't read mine, so that's why I unfollow most people who don't follow me back. There are some exceptions though. I follow some media people and amazing Tweeters and never unfollow them. And I put them in a Twitter list to make sure I can see their Tweets easily. I love Twitter lists.

These are the main tools I use for building my presence on social media daily. I love technology too, so that makes it easier for me to do all this. Please add the tools you find useful below, so we can all share what works with each other.

Thanks for coming by. To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy my guide to social media. And enjoy!

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #7 Where is social media heading?

Social media is changing fast. Facebook buys Instagram. Google+ changes its look and feel, again. Twitter gets more visual and is used to assess the public mood and soon it will help predict riots and stock market rallies.

All these are real stories in the past few months. Try searching for #socialmedia stories on Twitter and you will be assaulted by wave after wave of developments in social media. Every minute.

But where will all this lead us? I see three clear trends, each of which could lead to big developments:

1. The visual web. Instagram video, Google glasses and local YouTube2 feeds will allow us to travel almost anywhere and experience everything as ultimate-voyeurs, but beyond that expect artistic photojournalism, fashion fabrics that change colour, people tracking, your visual life on a site, celebrity holograms at your local fashion outlet and rebranding sites that will let you see how you might appear with a few nicks and tucks.

2. The auto posting trend. Expect your phone to auto post your location to Eightsquare, your preferences from your GoogleGlasses2 to your life-blog and your audio-to-text tweets to Twitter2. Going beyond that we will be tracked by location posting sites for curfew, remote working and spouse spying applications.

3. The digital divide. The erosion of the middle class will lead to a divide between those of us who pursue hourly deals on energy and fuel and Bigger Mac deals and those few of us who need hologram security services, auto-taser fencing and  helicopter extraction from urban locations. Security zones will extend to elite stores, clubs and hotels, all invisible to the rest of us by their anonymous exteriors.

Much of the above will happen before 2020. If you want to create a start-up focusing on what we will be the number one social media brand in that year, consider incorporating some of the above elements.

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!

Hand selling with social media

I believe we are in a new age of hand selling or screen selling (screlling?). I have heard it said that one of the main benefits of meeting a good sales person is that you can have items recommended to you. You can also get to see their faces.

But social media allows you to meet and greet individual buyers and answer their questions from all over the world. I get about 2000 hits a day from many countries.

The main benefits of screlling are IMO:

* You can meet people from all over the world and communicate with them. Google Translate means you can even talk to people in many languages.

* You can engage long term with people, answering different questions over time and building up relationships.

* You can keep a track of people's names or identities so you can tell them when your new product or service comes out.

* You don't have to waste time and money travelling around and you won't get wet if it's raining.

The downsides are:

* You mightn't make make strong connections with people, as you don't get to meet people personally. However I believe it takes more than one physical meeting to make friends with people. Multiple meetings and shared interests are just the start. And long term social media friendships can be meaningful too.

* You don't get to see the cool sunsets from a different town.

And that's it, is it?

Ok, here's your challenge. Can you tell me what other downsides there are to not meeting customers for smaller value items? Aside from missing the smell of the fish, that is!

Thanks! I hope you enjoy these posts and I hope you can  tell me about other downsides I may have missed.

Newsjacking & Social Media Updated

What is newsjacking?



Newsjacking is inserting yourself or your organisation into a story that is being covered in the media. You do this by commenting prominently on the story online or by providing a link to a relevant post on your blog or web site.

Examples of this include a marketing expert suggesting a marketing plan for Occupy Wall Street, a software company president talking about a major industry takeover and inserting his own company into subsequent media stories because of the relevance of his comments and the London Fire Brigade offering Kate Winslett training after she was involved in a fire on Richard Branson's private retreat in the British Virgin Islands.

The purpose of newsjacking is to get people to click on your link, to get traffic to your site and gain visibility.

And it works.

The rules of newsjacking are that you have to insert yourself quickly into the story, coming late means the story had played out, that you have to have something relevant to say, and that you post or web site supports what you say.

The PR industry is changing. No longer is it good enough to simply push out press releases to friendly journalists and hope they will cover your story. Now you have to find a real link between something happening in the media or in the world and whatever you are promoting.

Social media is the glue that binds all this together. It's where you contact journalists covering the story and refer them to your blog post and where you inform people that you have a post and a real connection to the media article.

My highest spike in blog viewers came when I made a relevant post on the UK Guardian book page and on the New York Times in one day. That day I got over 500 views. My comment was one of the first on that page, I had something relevant to say and the comment had a link in it to my blog.

Old fashioned PR isn't entirely dead, but it's changing fast.

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #6 Can social media bring about social change or not?

There are a number of commentators who belittle social media as an agent of change. I disagree with that view.

For me social media is as much an instrument of change as radio was in the 2nd world war. It is simply a means of mass communication - a some-to-many communication system where about 10% of users create about 90% of the volume.

As for creating social change, the facts are that during the week President Mubarak resigned the number of tweets about political change increased ten fold in Egypt. That fact was taken from a study by a Professor Howard at the University of Washington reported here.

In addition videos featuring protest and politics were watched over 5 million times and the amount of online content about the political situation increased dramatically.

And at the time of the Tunisian revolution 20% of blogs were discussing the president, Ben Ali.

This wave of communication about social change spread throughout the region creating movements in a wide variety of Arab countries. Governments tried to crack down on social media in the region, but that seems only to have created a greater urge for information.

Now, it is true that we do not know how the new governments of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt will perform in the long run for their citizens, but to deny that social media acted as a communication tool, which aided change seems willfully blind.

Before this period the despotic governments in Arab countries seemed immovable. Now everyone in the region knows that social change is possible. Social media helped to make that a reality.

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!