My online social media identity is a mess!

I run a company of some size, we have over 50 full-time employees. However, I do not sit in an office removed from the day-to-to-day fray.  At this size, I think the president should still be part of the team and helping with key messaging, building blogs, and social media.

Well, I might be wrong on this and maybe it's time for me to be a little more strategic and less day-to-day. So I'm beginning to rethink my own online strategy.  

Twitter. My biggest day to day involvement is having my own Twitter account:   @VSpellCityMayor

While the Twitter account is not listed on any of the four major product sites that we run, it does have over 750 followers (started it for real in October). I do get some help with retweets from the people who tweet on behalf of our different product lines.  The two product lines that I'm closest to with this account are:

VocabularySpellingCity - 6770 followers

Science4Us - 470 followers

Facebook. I also, under my role as VocabularySpellingCity Mayor, have a Facebook account which I do not do much with. I've thought of having my Tweets automatically feed into my Facebook account so that it has some activity.  I also have a personal Facebook account but I think I keep that separate from work and have it private so only friends can see me. I'm not sure however. 

LinkedIn. This part is pretty well done. Each of our four major business units has its own linkedin profile and my profile links to each of the four.

Forum. At this point, our most active public forum is for the parents of our homeschooling students.  We also maintain a private forum for our home school high school students called Time4Friends.  Our forum for non-religious homeschool parents is also big.

Blogs - I have a number of blogs on different blogs. 

Wearing my small business technology hat, I write this blog covering issues like online marketing techniques, financial management, HR and benefits, issues of investment, and cashflow.  

I have other blogs on other topics such as credit card processing, my sports life as an over 50 athlete, and  homeschool online education.  

Facebook's Advertising Strategy

I can discern over the last three years, three phases of their messaging to potential advertising clients.

2012-13.  Big focus on taking out display ads next to different targets. The emphasis was on competing with Google by having good cost per conversion.

2013-14.  Big focus on improving your company's Facebook page and getting more followers. We were encouraged to advertise our page to get more followers. Now, businesses have lots of followers but only 4% of them see the posts.

2014-forward.  The focus now seems to be on brand building on a mass market scale.  Much like TV, the emphasis in their marketing now seems to be on creating broad brand awareness in the market about the brand and its positioning which is an investment in longer term market development, not a short-term sales generation tool.

I wonder what's next....

What Social Media Links does Google Count?

Google says that they rate sites based on whether other sites cite them as in, are there meaningful natural links.  I wondered how his applies to links on social media so I dug into Webmaster tools and found the following:

Youtube links - reported in Google's Webmaster tools. Not clear whether it's just in the original post or the comments too.

Facebook - Google apparently doesn't list them. It's been much reported that Facebook blocks the Google spiders.

Twitter - same as Facebook

Linkedin - I expected to find Linkedin reported but I did not. This is surprising to me and counter to what I've heard.  Anybody have any reaction?

Pinterest - Goolge reports these.

BTw, what you do you think of they way that our social media icons are working on Science4Us?  We have both the shares and the likes up.

• Force and Motion Lesson Plans
• 3D Location and Perspective - Student Lessons
• Motion Lesson Plans, Worksheets
• Science Physical Force Lessons for Elementary Students
• Magnets Lesson Plan for 1st Grade
• Simple Machines Elementary Lessons

Facebook: More Obnoxious by the Day

I think Facebook will be a very different user experience shortly.  Two possibilities.

1.  Facebook can continue down the current business model in which case, they do not have a bright future. Many people are now sick and tired of the Facebook business model. To be clear, they are selling my personal info, using my image, and intruding on my group discussions with advertisements in a truly obnoxious way.  Right now, I have no other great social media choices so I can just opt out from participating or grit my teeth and put up with it.  But every day, FB seems to be even more heavy handed in their intrusions.

2.  Facebook can back-off their obnoxious intrusive behavior and launch another business model. In this case, they have a bright future.  There are many choices:
- Archivist - If I could put all my pictures up on Facebook but not necessarily share them. And retrieve or print them or use them at will, I'd be willing to pay a reasonable fee. Right now, I pay Google probably about $50 a year to archive all my emails, I'd probably do the same for FB.  There's a lot of money in that. Why don't they do it?
- Search Engine - They have their little like and share buttons on almost every page on the web. They know a lot about traffic. Why not launch a true search engine, separate from the social media, which finds search results on some novel algorithms based on their unique understanding of the web and people's behavior and preferences.  They could then get into the gravy train of putting ads right where people want them (when they are searching) and NOT right where we don't want them, in the middle of social interactions.
- Private Forums - I run a reasonably sized company (50 some odd people on the payroll...well, they're not all so odd...although on average, since there are some really odd ones, I think the odd term works).  We have some Facebook groups that have 20K and 30K likes but we don't really like using them for discussions with our members because, just as we are helping them understand how to use our "math homeschool program" (for intance), Facebook puts right in the middle of the discussion, advertisements for four competitors who have bought the right to put up ads against those terms. It's confusing as hell to our users who sometimes think that we are suggesting that they try those products. It's infuriating to us.  And it redoubles our commitment to get people off of Facebook for discussions and back into our private forums in which we control the environment and make our share of the profits off of any ads.  Why can't FB offer a private label or section of FB so we can have discussions there which are NOT opportunities for competitors to intrude?.

I'm hoping that Facebook is just doing number 1 (obnoxious advertising and privacy violations) for an interim period to make some cash until plan 2 rolls out.  If not, I hope they become the next MySpace or Friendster and that they get replaced by some people with better judgement.

BTW, this is my second time offering free business advice to Facebook. I published advice for them back in 2009 but they didn't seem to listen. Silly people.