Facebook and Twitter are very powerful. Yet they only account for a portion of your overall online influence. There are many other places on the web that you could extend your reach. These places include your own website, emails, Yahoo Groups, Google Communities, and various other online community forums. When investing efforts in these web properties, your biggest concern is probably how to measure ROI of your efforts. If this has bothered you, you should try SNS Analytics. SNS Analytics offers a feature called Custom Campaign that can systematically organize, track, and analyze click-throughs for your activities all over the web.

The Custom Campaign is easy to use. Take a quick look at this sample custom campaign screenshot, then try out yourself for a few minutes, you should get pretty concrete idea how you can benefit.

Custom Campaign Demo

Every day is a social media day. Happy social with http://sns.ly!

Trick or treat! The SNS Custom Campaign should be sweeter than your other Halloween candies.

Facebook Marketing · Google Analytics · Real-time Analytics · SNS · SNS Analytics · SNS Marketing · SNS.ly · SNSanalytics · Social Marketing · Twitter · Twitter Marketing

Many of you may have setup some sort of automation to let content flow on your social media channels. These automation setups save you a lot of time. Your online social becomes efficient – a great value SNS Analytics has worked on persistently to deliver. That is good start. However, there are more you can do and SNS can help, to make your social streams more streamlined and more attractive.

First, you may want to optimize the timing of your posts, so that they look much less artificially pre-defined. Twitter is about real-time. Some of your readers may be following your multiple Twitter accounts on real time. They could be annoyed if they always see the same posts repeatedly from multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. To avoid this potential bad feeling, you may want to utilize the randomized schedule feature provided by SNS to distribute your posts randomly across a time window.

By randomizing your posts, you can also avoid to have a burst pattern of your content flow. With a regular per hour schedule, all your posts burst out at a certain minute of each hour. During the remaining of the hour, you’d have no post. A burst pattern is not the best way to attract your followers’ attention. Because of the real-time nature of Twitter, things come and go very fast on Twitter. Other social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are also increasingly real-time. It is very simple to configure randomized schedule with SNS, see this screenshot from a social campaign definition page on http://sns.ly.

Use randomized schedule to streamline your posts

Besides randomized schedule, there is another important way to make your social streams more attractive. A tweet has its virtues being 140 characters compact. However, to always make tweet like posts on your Facebook walls is not likely the best choice. In our opinion and observations, rich media posts can help attract more attention in general in a Facebook news feed stream. Though, there are some technical hurdles in order to automatically compose a good rich media post with the right picture and text extraction.  Don’t worry, SNS has done much of the hardwork to make auto generated rich media posts look nice. See our previous blog article How to make rich media posts to multiple Facebook Pages and Groups, and automate for more details. In case you are not satisfied with your rich media post results, remember we have multiple venues to provide you timely support.

The idea of enriching tweets is not a patent of SNS. Some much bigger players also know this. Noticeably, the official LinkedIn app for Twitter very recently added an option to expand the simple 140 characters tweet into a rich media post, very similar to what SNS offers. There are two simple steps to setup your LinkedIn social streams. First, automate your tweets from your Twitter accounts to your LinkedIn accounts. Second, turn on the rich media option.  We have covered the first step in a previous blog here: Some best practices of automating Twitter content to other social networks.

Every day is a social media day. Happy social with http://sns.ly!

Facebook Marketing · SNS · SNS Analytics · SNS Marketing · SNS.ly · SNSanalytics · Social Buzz · Social Feed · Social Marketing · Social RSS · Social Stream · Twitter Marketing

Yes, every user can manage 1,000 RSS/ATOM feeds, 1,000 Twitter accounts, 1,000 Facebook accounts, 1,000 Facebook Pages, and 1,000 many other things on http://sns.ly. Plus, this is all FREE!

Does this sound crazy? Yes and No. Yes, if you just heard some popular website is limiting its free service level to only 1 RSS feed. We don’t want to humiliate this website, so no mentioning of its name. No, if you were there when Google first announced to offer 1,000MB mailbox for free when Yahoo was charging for a paltry 6MB mailbox.

Crazy or not is not the primary point here. We are not making this buzz for the sake of buzz. We are here to create values for the Internet community and to promote the free spirit of Internet.

Is the whole idea technically feasible and reliable? Absolutely. SNS services are running on top of innovative Google cloud computing platform. Namely, the Google platform helps SNS services to run stable, and scale up smoothly along with the fastest possible traffic growth. The fact is not only that SNS is completely on cloud computing, but also that SNS is best tuned to leverage the power of cloud computing. The technical co-founder of SNS understands cloud computing from inside out. Several years back, he rejected a Google job offer and joined Salesforce.com. He was a member of the core team that engineered Salesforce.com cloud computing platform.

Is the whole idea practically sustainable? Our answer is yes. In fact, many users of SNS have been running 1,000 feeds for months. The excellent infrastructure of SNS allows operation cost to be at very affordable level. We don’t see a need to ever start to charge at this service level. But we will charge for services above and beyond to keep our business grow.

All these said, feed management is only a portion of SNS services. SNS Analytics offers a full suite of social media mgmt solutions, including social conversations, social marketing campaign management, real-time tracking and analytics, etc. SNS is growingly to be the one place that can manage all your social media activities for both your personal and business social needs.

Every day is a social media day! Happy social with http://sns.ly!

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SNS Analytics can help you make rich media posts to multiple Facebook accounts, pages, and groups. In addition, SNS can help you make this entire process automated. You can define your rich media multi-wall posting setups in SNS social marketing campaigns.

First, let’s take a quick look at how to make one rich media multi-wall post. We will watch how our friend Eric Rojas did it. Eric just clicked the “post a message” button after login. He then chose to post to both his Facebook and Twitter circles. He got all his choices, especially the list of Facebook walls he wanted to post against. He selected his own Twitter account, his own Facebook profile wall, and the wall of his favorite Facebook Page ‘SNS Analytics’. A few quick typings and clicks away, he was ready to post. The screen looked like the following.

Post rich media to multiple Facebook and Twitter walls

Eric clicked, and the message was out immediately onto all Facebook and Twitter walls he selected. Here is screenshot of his post on one Facebook Page.

Eric's post on his favorite page

Note that Eric doesn’t own this Facebook Page. The point is that he could post on the walls of thousands and thousands of other people’s Facebook Pages. That is a huge audience base that Eric could influence. In fact, the audience base could be easily the whole Facebook user base. Good news is that you can do just the same thing as Eric did.

More importantly, SNS can help you not only post to multiple walls, but also AUTOMATE the posting process, and track click-throughs rates through powerful social analytics solutions.

Every day is a social media day! Happy social with http://sns.ly!

Facebook · Facebook Marketing · SNS · SNS Analytics · SNS Marketing · SNS.ly · SNSanalytics · Social Buzz · Social Marketing · Social Stream · Twitter · Twitter Marketing

The influential social media blog Mashable chose today (June 30th) to be the Social Media Day. There are no particular reasons why today is the day. However, we fully embrace the idea of celebrating a Social Media Day. Here are a few reasons that we think we are ready to mark such a day sooner rather than later.

Long before we founded SNS Analytics, we envisioned that the social media Internet will surpass the traditional Internet. Now the trend has been more than clear. In fact, it may not just be a trend, it may have been the fact already. Since recently, numerous stats have shown the the biggest social media site facebook.com has become the most trafficked Internet site. Twitter is certainly another black hole absorbing people’s online attentions. Traditional web properties, including Yahoo and MSN, are doing their best to add more social flavors. May the whole Internet become social some day!

Social media is so influential not just because of its size, but also because of its relevancy and speed. The social relevancy of Facebook traffic data is probably what Facebook can scare off Google the most. The real-time power of Twitter information is likely to change people’s habit of search and choice of default search engine. A humongous scale problem is the need of a new generation social media analytics solutions. These solutions should offer social relevancy analytics and real-time speed, areas where traditional web analytics solutions are obsolete. SNS Analytics was just founded for this need.

In addition, we have firmly believed in that new generation social media analytics solutions should be much more generally available, to not only businesses but also to individuals. Virtually, everyone is connected nowadays. Everyone needs help to better organize one’s online social life. The Expo 2010 says ‘Better city better life’, we say ‘Better social better life’.

Finally, did I forget to say something? Here you go. Happy Social Media Day, to everyone, and especially to the many thousands of SNS registered users! We will continue to deliver best-of-breed solutions to be your social productivity companion and your social activity navigator.

Every day is a social media day! Happy social with http://sns.ly!

Facebook · Facebook Marketing · Real-time Analytics · Real-time Search · SNS · SNS Analytics · SNS Marketing · SNS.ly · SNSanalytics · Social Marketing · Twitter · Twitter Marketing

SNS Analytics has a well organized social media life cycle management framework. Built on top of this framework, SNS solutions can easily handle activities for different social networks. For Facebook, the basic steps are the same: 1. Add your Facebook accounts; 2. Add your content sources; 3. Define your social marketing campaigns; 4. View your reports.

In addition to the generic solutions, SNS also provides many Facebook specific features to help users make the best out of Facebook.

I. There are many walls each Facebook user can post to. (on Twitter, each Twitter user has one ‘wall’ and can only post to his/her own ‘wall’.) Almost all Facebook entities have walls. For instance, a Facebook user’s profile has a wall. A Facebook Group has a wall. A Facebook Page has a wall. A Facebook Event has a wall, etc. In addition, a Facebook use can post to the walls of other people’s Facebook properties, subject to permission control. Overall, there are a lot of choices on where to post for your contents. SNS.ly is in process of adding support for all possible Facebook walls. The following is a screenshot of SNS.ly Facebook account list page. You can click the group button or the page button  to manage your interested Facebook groups and pages respectively.

Facebook Accounts

II. Facebook supports a rich set of content formats, including links, pictures, videos, etc. When defining your social Marketing Campaigns, pay attention to the ‘Facebook Advanced’ section to make better use of Facebook.

III. Facebook is much more restrictive on the number of posts each Facebook user can make through one Facebook app. According to Facebook, the limit is dynamically adjusted, based on a few factors including click-through rates. For most Facebook users on SNS, the limit is 32 posts every day. Overall, this limit is much more restrictive, comparing to the daily limit of Twitter. You likely need pay more attention to this daily post limit imposed by Facebook.

Every day is a social media day! Happy social with http://sns.ly!

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SNS Analytics provides end-to-end Facebook and Twitter marketing solutions.  Within the complete social marketing solution suite, there are some worth mentioning nifty little features.  Utilizing these nifty features, you can achieve desirable subtle campaign effects.  Let’s go through some of them here.

Campaign effectiveness comparison

Assuming you have been doing your social marketing for a while, you would wonder how you can improve effectiveness of your marketing efforts.  First of all, you’d better have the capability to compare effects of your different marketing activities.  SNS Analytics provides easy ways for you to do these effect comparisons.  You can compare click-through rates of either two Twitter accounts or two campaigns.  Just go to the “Click-through Reports ” for a Twitter account or a campaign, respectively.  The following is a sample chart comparing click-throughs of two Twitter accounts that publish similar contents.

Comparing click-throughs of two Twitter accounts

Multi-level keywords filtering

SNS allows you to use keywords to filter your content sources. Keywords filtering help you tweet only matched content to matched Twitter accounts.  SNS keywords filtering provides the following fexibilities.

(i). Keywords can be specified inside any of your Message Campaigns or Feed Campaigns.  If keywords are specified, un-matched content will not be tweeted.

(ii). Keywords can be also be specified for each Twitter account.  If specified, these keywords serve as an extra level of filtering, which safeguards relevancy of tweets for that Twitter account.

(iii). When keyword filter is used for a Twitter account, this keyword filter would normally apply to any marketing campaign that send tweets to this Twitter account.  Sometimes, this filter may be too restrictive.  For instance, you may want to tweet out some special announcements on that Twitter account.  In such cases, you can turn on the ‘Disable Twitter accounts keyword filtering’ option in a specific campaign.

(iv). Keywords filtering is not just a good way to improve content relevancy.  SNS automatically appends a hash tag for every matched keyword on a tweet, within the 140 character limit.  A relevant hash tag will significantly improve the chance of a tweet to appear on various Twitter search engine results.

Follow Twitter trends

In addition to static keywords you can specify for your Twitter accounts and campaigns, you can also associate your tweets with dynamic Twitter trend words.  SNS provides a ‘Follow Twitter trends’ option for each campaign.  When the option is on, and if any current Twitter trend word matches the content of your tweet, the trend word will be added as a hash tag to your tweet.  By attaching a trend word hash tag, your tweet got much better chance to appear on people’s real-time search results.

Keep in mind, this Twitter trend word matching is for search optimization.  It is not a keyword filtering, i.e., it doesn’t prevent any of your tweets from being posted out.

Post only feed titles, not links

It has been very popular to using RSS feed to automate tweets to Twitter accounts.  Normally, a RSS feed entry has a descriptive title and a link that points to a full article.  It is almost perfect to translate a RSS feed entry to a tweet, with the feed entry link being shortened to a short URL.

However, there are times a feed entry link does not carry extra meaningful information on top of the feed entry title.  One common case is if the feed is a Twitter timeline RSS feed.  For a Twitter timeline RSS feed, the title of each feed entry already contains the whole 140 characters (including shortened URLs if any).  So if you are tweeting a Twitter timeline RSS feed, you’d likely want to turn on this ‘Post only feed titles, not links’ option, when you define your Feed Campaign.

Every day is a social media day! Happy social with http://sns.ly!

Facebook · Facebook Marketing · Real-time Report · SNS · SNS Analytics · SNS.ly · SNSanalytics · Social Marketing · Twitter

Twitter is growingly a center of people’s online social activities.  It is no doubt that you want to manage your Twitter activities efficiently and effectively.  Assuming you have done that, what is next?  There are other social network presences that may matter for you.  To name a few, Facebook Profile, Facebook Page, Facebook Group, Google Buzz, LinkedIn Group, LinkedIn Profile.  This article shares some best practices on how to get your Twitter content automatically populated to those social networks.

from Twitter to Facebook Profile Wall

This is the most basic level in terms of automating content to Facebook. There are many choices.  The Facebook app Twitter can be considered as the offical app for this purpose.  This app is developed by Twitter.com.  Another common choice is Friendfeed.  There are two reasons we don’t like the Friendfeed approach.  First, we encountered some bugs.  Second, the flight for your tweets would have 2 legs.  Your tweets first go from Twitter to Friendfeed. Taking a break for some unknown minutes, then go from Friendfeed to Facebook.

SNS Analytics no doubt offers this basic function. The advantage of using SNS is that it offers a complete media management solutions for you. Among many benefits, you will be able to track your clicks from Facebook as a separate channel. By tracking separately, you’d know your readership breakdowns better. Do your fans read you more from Twitter or Facebook? SNS.ly can give you the answer.

from Twitter to Facebook Page/Group Walls

Most apps stop at helping you post on the wall of your Facebook Profile. You may find this is too limited soon.

Facebook is very rich media. There are many other walls in Facebook. Every Facebook Page or Group has a wall. To improve your influence, you’d want to post to the walls of whatever relevent Facebook pages or groups. SNS can help you automate posts to those Facebook pages and groups you do NOT even own. That is power to influence thousands or even millions of people, without having to do the hard work to build up your own pages and groups.

If you are owner of some Facebook Page, you’d want to have the choice to post to the page  as either a fan or the page admin. SNS supports both choices.

You may not have realized these detailed power of Facebook. They are real and you can learn to master them quickly. http://sns.ly is probably the best solution on the market that can help automate your posts and quickly achieve influence levels that you are dreaming of. All these functionalities are available and free at SNS standard service level.

from Twitter to Google Buzz

Google Buzz is relatively new.  There is no time for too many choices yet.  However, the official approach provided by Google Buzz looks pretty handy.  You just need go to Google Buzz and add Twitter as a connected site.  That is it.  You are done.  Within seconds, you should see some of your tweets pumped into your buzz.  Cool!  That shows Google is still pretty agile, in spite of its size.

from Twitter to LinkedIn Group

Many people probably don’t know.  LinkedIn allows you to publish your tweets or any other feed content to the LinkedIn Group News section.  To setup, you can go to your LinkedIn Group, click the ‘News’ tab, and then click ‘Manage news feeds’, your screen should look like the following screenshot.  Just add the RSS feed of your Twitter account there.

LinkedIn Group - Manage News Feeds

Where to look for Twitter account RSS feed

You can get the RSS feed for any Twitter account as long as the account is not set to protect its tweets.  The RSS feed is available on the homepage of each Twitter account.  For instance, to get the RSS feed of Twitter account SNSanalytics, you can go to http://twitter.com/SNSanalytics, and grab the link that says “RSS feed of SNSanalytics’s tweets”.

from Twitter to LinkedIn Profile

Some third party companies claim that they can automate tweets to LinkedIn.  We don’t bother to try out because we find out the offical LinkedIn application tweets is just great.  You can log in to your LinkedIn account, then click click here to preview the LinkedIn tweets application.  Once setup, the tweets application automatically grabs your tweets and updates your LinkedIn Profile status.

Every day is a social media day! Happy social with http://sns.ly!

Facebook · Facebook Marketing · SNS · SNS Analytics · SNS.ly · SNSanalytics · Social Marketing · Twitter · Twitter Marketing

According to various Twitter statistics, about one half of all tweets are posted through automated computer programs, the other half are conversational, i.e., posted individually with human interaction.  Both automated and conversational tweets contribute to the organic growth of Twitter community.

SNS Analytics has delivered probably the best solutions to manage automated tweets.  The solutions can manage complete life cycle of automated tweets, including automation, tracking, reporting, and optimization.

Until today, however, SNS Analytics did not have a meaningful user interface to manage conversational tweets – the other half of Twitter traffic.  It caused some inconvenience for our users.

All our users, please be aware that you can now use SNS Analytics to easily manage your Twitter conversations.  You can access the conversation management feature by the ‘Conversation Managements’ menu item under ‘Marketing Channels’. You can also access by clicking the button on your Twitter Account list page.

A sample Twitter account list screen

Please keep in mind that our conversation management is intended primarily to provide convenience for people who love our core services – complete social marketing campaign mgmt solutions enabled with advanced real-time analytical algorithms.  It is not in our plan to compete with purely conversation oriented Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite.

By supporting both automated tweets and conversational tweets, SNS now becomes the one place where people can manage all their Twitter activities. Go SNS Analytics!

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You may have been very impressed by yourself that your tweets have been clicked by many. However, this may well be a very false impression. There is the ugly reality revealed by SNS Analytics – a great deal of tweet clicks are not human.

Probably everybody who cares about click numbers knows that some click numbers are from computer robots. What most people don’t know is how much percentage of the clicks are from robots. If you have to guess, you may think that at least 50% of your click numbers are from human clicks. If so, you are likely wrong. According to SNS Analytics, average human click percentages are most likely less than 20%. Usually, a Twitter account gets higher human click percentage if it has bigger follower base. This is not necessarily always the case though.

Recently, one super Twitter user (with over 30K+ followers) started to use SNS Analytics and found out the human click percentages of his tweets are around 10%. The number is so different from what other Twitter services (including bit.ly) have reported. For a while, he was mentally derailed. But after the initial shock, he realized that he has lived in illusion for too long. He now feels good that he is not misled by false inflated numbers any more.

The truth may be ugly. But knowing the truth can be critical, because the value of a robot click is totally incomparable to that of a real human click. You should ask yourself: do I want to see big inflated numbers or some small but relevant numbers?

Every day is a social media day! Happy social with http://sns.ly!

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