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The Secret to Small Business Advertising Using Twitter Promoted Accounts

If you’re a Small Business, and if you’re a little late to the Social Media game, Twitter now makes it really easy to make up for lost time using a “Promoted Account” advertising campaign.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with @DavidBoles and Twitter Ads, and while the effects are not as straightforward and as quantifiable as Facebook advertising, there’s still some sweet in the Tweet.

The first thing you need to decide when starting a Small Business Promoted Account campaign on Twitter is what end result you want.  Do you want Retweets or Favorites or targeted click-throughs, or like me, are you merely in search of new Followers?

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Weaving the Social Mesh: Write What You Want to Know

I am often asked by friends and associates what they should write.  They want to know how to get people to read their blog, buy their book, get more followers on Twitter or more Page LIKEs on Facebook or lots of plusses on Google+.

My answer to that inquiry is always the same: “Just Write Something!” — and everything else will eventually fall.

That advice jumps in the face of two common writing canards: “Write What You Know” and its doppelgänger, “Write What You Don’t Know.” The first school of thought allegedly makes you an expert on your own selfie life; the second avenue of percussion quickly resounds into a research project where the self often goes missing.

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LEET! We Now Have Over 1,337 Boles Blogs Followers!

LEET!

Today, thanks to you, we celebrate yet another milestone here on Boles Blogs: We have surpassed the 1,337 Followers mark!

Here’s the latest morning addition to our WordPress.com Trophy Case:

Continue reading → LEET! We Now Have Over 1,337 Boles Blogs Followers!

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Why We Converted a Facebook Personal Account to a Business Page

On Saturday, I made the decision to convert my personal Facebook account into a Business page.  It was not a difficult choice to make because, even though I had over 5,000 friends and 200 followers — when your friends queue is full, Facebook forces them into “following” you — I was really only posting Boles Blogs updates to my timeline.

Even though I don’t make any money from Boles Blogs, creating a Facebook business page offers some unification of thought and clarity of purpose on the social network.  I would “lose” my friends and their updates, as well as my own timeline since 2006, but I would also gain thousands of “Likes” — “friends” get converted into “Likes” when you convert a page — and my “followers” would also, magically, become “Likes” on the new page, too.  I would only have to update one Facebook page instead of two.

Here’s what the new Boles Business page looks like now on Facebook:

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Have You Wasted Your #Hashtag?

I have never been a fan of Twitter or Facebook or the other social nooses that now pass for content creation, and I’m glad when I read — every so often — that I am not alone in my disdain for the lonesomeness of a hooligan world gone viral:

Twitter

It’s toast. Over. Done. History. Soon to be as behind the curve as Facebook, someday completely forgotten like Friendster.

Huh?

It’s the cacophony.

You see there are too many people on the service. As a result, very few are heard. It’s happened over the past six months, tweeting is like a stone in a waterfall, or more accurately, pissing in the wind. In other words, if you tweet and nobody reads it have you wasted your time?

Today Rick Warren tweeted something I wrote. He’s got in excess of a million followers. The fact that I can reach him stuns me. But despite his only tweeting twice since then, the retweets have not gone nuclear. Oh, there are plenty, a double digit number, nineteen to be exact, but if it had been six months ago, I’d be a hero at the Saddleback Church.

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Revisiting the “Freshly Pressed Effect”

Yesterday, we were delighted to win a spot on the WordPress.com Freshly Pressed page for our Kaposi’s Sarcoma article, and that sort of public recognition has, in the past, meant big booms in readership and other quantifiable areas of blog publishing and — as I did in the past with our first Freshly Pressed win for Black Cat Bone — I will share those metrics with you now.

First, because of our Freshly Pressed feature on June 5th, we enjoyed our “Best day for Follows on Boles Blogs” — that is a big and huge record for us because followers tend to become dedicated readers and they stick around.

WordPress.com followers are counted, and not counted, in odd ways.  Facebook friends are counted in the final, public, tally, while  “moved” followers from old blogs to a new blog do not count.  No LinkedIn connections are counted as followers — even though they should be — to match the same relational logic as Facebook friends.

Continue reading → Revisiting the “Freshly Pressed Effect”