Part of what prompted the creation of Speaking Pro Central was a presentation that I was doing to the Los Angeles chapter of the NSA.  The presentation was on the use of Social Media - especially Blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn as a means of building reputation and reaching prospects.  I’m very much looking forward to continued conversation on this topic and plan to do a little bit of blogging here about things related to my personal Speaking and Workshop Services.

I still need to do a follow-up to the presentation with some links and further thoughts based on questions raised, but in the meantime, I received an inquiry from one of the participants and I think it’s a great way to have some dialog around the topic.

Hi Tony,

Since you asked, I would love your feedback.  I recently was fortunate to be able to post an article (Blog) in the Huffington Post titled, The United States of Anger. Here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/mt7r42

I’m afraid I was not able to take full advantage of this and would love your suggestions.
Here is what I did:
I sent out a tweet with a link to the article.
I posted the article on Facebook.
I put the link on the update section of LinkedIn.
I sent emails with the link to everyone I could think of asking them to read the article and either comment, become a fan or retweet the article.

I don’t think I got much traction as my followers did not go up on Twitter — I got only a handful of new Facebook friends, nothing happened on LinkedIn and had only 5 tweets and 3 comments (I responded to all of them) on the Huff Post to date. It’s been up one week now.

Question: How can I best promote this article to draw more people into my social marketing circle?

I also have not posted it to my own Blog yet because I wanted the Huff Post to have exclusivity at least for the first week. Now I would think it’s OK to post elsewhere.

Again, you were most informative and very gracious with your question answering. We all benefitted greatly.

Thank you,
Judith

I can’t claim that I have definitive answers here, but I definitely have lots of thoughts.

Good Actions - Others?

Your list of actions on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Email is pretty good.

A couple of things you might consider:

• Use ping.fm to simplify updating your multiple statuses (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn).  Maybe do this a few times.
• Use tweetlater or similar service to tweet several times about the post.

It sounds like you somewhat did this, but you should maybe look for groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, etc. where the intended audience (who I’m not quite sure who it is) hangs out and post about it there.  Be careful not to be spammy.

Right Article?

Was this the right article to try to use to springboard your followers?  I’m not quite sure what the audience is that you are trying to reach, and I’m probably not a great judge, but the article wasn’t as sticky as you might have wanted if you were going to spend the time to try to promote it.

If I’m going to spend time, I make sure it’s something that will be good Retweet Bait or Link Bait.  If you are not familiar with link baiting techniques, take a look at:

• 20 Linkbaiting Techniques
• Art of Linkbaiting

I’ve personally had great success getting links via Top Lists, Tools, etc.  The following are some of my top posts on my blog and all follow the pattern.

• 100 eLearning Articles and White Papers
• Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog
• Rapid eLearning Tools

Bottom line, make sure it’s good content that will be something that gets links and retweeted.  I’m not convinced your audience would see the post and feel like telling it to someone else.

Right Place?

And there’s the issue that it’s on the Huffington Post.  It’s good to do posts on other blogs that will drive people back to your blog.  Congrats on getting that to happen.  Actually, Judith, you might share what you did and how many clicks you got.

But, wouldn’t it be better to point people in other social media venues back to your blog.  So, probably you could wait a week and do a follow-up post.  Or even better - do a little more on your blog and have Huffington point to that and then point everyone else back to your blog.

Right Results?

Your statement about the results you received were interesting:

I don’t think I got much traction as my followers did not go up on Twitter — I got only a handful of new Facebook friends, nothing happened on LinkedIn and had only 5 tweets and 3 comments (I responded to all of them) on the Huff Post to date. It’s been up one week now.

I personally look at traffic to the page.  And as well:

• BackTweets to track tweets that link to my blog
• IceRocket to track links to my blog

I’m first looking for those three things to occur.  That tells me that I was successful in getting initial traction.

Because you were not posting from your blog, it would take a lot more work to track it for this post.  Again, I’d prefer if you tried to get people onto your own blog to make it easier - AND -

If you are successful getting people to view the post, are you going to get them to take the actions that you probably want:

• Subscribe to your blog
• Follow you on twitter

And then way down the list would probably be:

• Link to you on LinkedIn
• Friend you on Facebook

Both of these generally imply more of a relationship - so I wouldn’t expect you to get much of either.

On your blog, you have links to 3 of the 4.  But, whoops, where’s the big call to action that says “Enter your email to receive free articles from Judith” - and where’s your subscribe via RSS?  That’s probably item number 1.

The other thing is that I’d make your appeal just a little more direct around Social Networking - rather than “Judith on Twitter” - how about “Follow Me on Twitter” - and rather than “Social Networking” - how about “Connect with Me” - and maybe create a page that tells people that you want to connect with them.

A Process

Again, these are all just thoughts and suggestions.  There’s not right answer.  And it’s a long process.

I look forward to seeing your response via a blog post or via comments.

And I hope that other speakers might weigh in on this.