Facebook Best Practices For Brands

In this podcast, I will be covering suggestions for Facebook posts as well as a brief overview and explanation of the Facebook algorithm. I believe that this information is valuable to every business that currently uses social media or is considering entering their brand into the social media space. I will be sharing a solid overall strategy that is designed to strengthen your own digital platforms and grow your social media audience.

Hello my name is Carlos Quintero, owner and founder of the MediaOnQ Podcast, where I help you sort through all of the digital media clutter so that you can compete in today’s web economy. 

I have a wide range of clients ranging from individual personalities in media all the way up to large entertainment media companies all over the United States. Recently one of my clients in the healthcare industry shared that she planned on canceling most of her traditional marketing since she could simply post on Facebook and get her message out to the community.

It is amazing really how while there is some truth to her way of thinking there simply is a lot missing.

I then had to respond with, you know that at best you will only ever reach 16% of your fans right? That literally means that out of every 100 followers, at best only 16 of them will see your Facebook post. 

I need to point out that Facebook will allow you to reach more than 16% but you will have to pay for it by running ads through their network.

It is kind of hard to swallow isn’t it? We all know how much effort and work it takes to keep up with social media on top of our daily workload.

After reviewing a little bit over 50 Facebook brand pages, I came up with my 5 Facebook Post Suggestions to help improve your marketing’s reach on Facebook.

My 5 Facebook Post Suggestions

Based on my experience, I would suggest that every Facebook post should do one or more of the following:

Focus on Impact

Move Fast

Be Bold

Transparency

Build Social Value

Let’s break these down a bit.

• Focus on impact

o Does it Matter? Why does it matter? Is it relevant?

o Now remember we are talking about the brand’s visibility on Facebook to apply these questions to your brand and your brand’s target audience.

• Move Fast 

o My advice here is simple. If you are posting the same thing everyone else is posting, what or why should the masses flock to you for the information that is readily available basically everywhere on the web. The answer is simple there is no need.

o I have a news media client who produces local news stories as well as covers larger regional and national news events. We’ve all seen various digital news sources, they basically all share the same information right? Well the social media value that this client brings is the ability to bring attention to well covered subjects through a different perspective, exclusive audio interviews, video or photos.

o In a nutshell what I am suggesting is that you add your own personal perspective to well covered topics so that your end product results in Original Content.

• Be Bold 

o What I mean by be bold is to simply allow your brand’s personality to show

o It is ok to be flawed – none of us are perfect

o Allow and encourage involvement

• Transparency 

o Show off your brands passion

o Encourage your audience to share in your passions

o Be Open

o Ask your audience for feedback AND remember to acknowledge their feedback

• Build Social Value 

o Bring value to your fans, in other words don’t turn your Facebook page into a self promoting platform but rather showcase how your brand impacts your customer’s lives.

o We’ve all been to the furniture store where instantly a sales person comes up and asks if they can help us find anything in particular...to me that approach is irritating. And while I know that the sales person is simply trying to earn their sales commission, it is really a quick way for me to want to get out of their store.

o It works the same in social media. You have to provide value to your visitors and be respectful of their time and effort to visit your brand’s page. 

o Once you get them to visit your page, you don’t want them to get that feeling of how quick can I get out of here to get away from the pushy sales person…You want to give them a reason to interact with your brand and hopefully want to learn more about your brand – ending up on your own website where you’ll have full control over their experience with your brand.

KEY Factors That Influence the Facebook Algorithm 

In case you don’t know. Your brands Facebook post will never reach 100% of your fans or followers. The Facebook algorithm controls how much of your content is actually visible to your fans. And if you are doing everything right at best you will only reach 16% of your fans at any one time.

Now let’s go over what that actually means and break it down a bit.

The Facebook algorithm has 3 rules in place that seek DIRECT and AUTHENTIC dialogue.

• Rule #1 Affinity

o Affinity looks for authentic type of posts and active interaction.

♣ What that means adding your own perspective to well covered topics and how your fans interact with your post

♣ If your fans don’t have a genuine interaction with your content, your messages will not reach them in the future. In other words, the fans who interact with you on a regular basis are the ones who get to see your messages, if they don't interact with you - your messages never makes it on to their news feed. 

♣ Remember; Brands can only reach 16% of their fans without paying for additional reach. 

• Rule #2 Weight

o While I don't want to discourage likes, likes carry very little weight. Sending a message, commenting on a post, tagging an individual, mentions on their own pages, writing on your wall...are all examples of direct and authentic dialogue that carry substantial weight. The more weight the brand carries, the higher the likelihood that that the brand will reach all 16% of the allowed reach.

• Rule #3 Timing

o This rule is basically looking for continuous interaction over time. 

o The main key for your brand here is not to post everything at once – Facebook attempts to view posts as a conversation…a two-sided conversation.

And those are the 3 rules that govern the Facebook algorithm.

Here’s a great rule of thumb when it comes to Facebook posts. As you’re thinking about what you are about to post ask yourself this question. Is this post positioned to produce continuous interplay? If the answer is yes, then it should be a good post. 

Always remember to push the traffic back to your own website – where you can control the brand experience for your website visitors. Think of your Facebook post as a way to "tease" your content. The objective should be to drive traffic back to your own website, blog or podcast.

We’ve all seen at least one post that makes us question; what on earth were they thinking. You know what I’m talking about; for example, I have a headache or I'm eating spaghetti O’s our of a can type of status update. These types of posts should never make it onto your brand pages.

It is important that you don’t isolate your digital media branding strategy. When it comes to your brand, you need to consider every aspect TV, Radio, Print, Outdoor, Web, Mobile, Social and even TXT platforms as a unified strategy. That strategy should create a compelling and captivating brand interaction specific to the delivery platform.

Facebook brand pages should be the voice of your company’s brand - I understand that this is a whole new way of thinking about and looking at social media. 

Follow my 5 Facebook Post Suggestions and you should gain more followers while you increase your brand’s top of mind awareness and build competitive barriers.

There are many companies out there that tackle social media without a plan. That will not be you.

If you’d like to provide feedback or would like additional information please visit mediaonq.com and contact me. I make it a point to answer all of my messages personally.

In the show notes, I will include several Facebook brand pages where these brands use the timeline to tell the brand story in a simplified and effective way. You can find them at mediaonq.com.

Join me next week where we will explore how to use Pintrest for business. Roberta will be joining as a special guest host; helping us drilling down on who should consider using it to increase their brand’s awareness and pinpointing specific marketing strategies to increase Pintrest followers and web traffic to your own sites.

I am Carlos Quintero and I run a digital media branding company in the Midwest, so if you’d like advice on your own Facebook brand page strategy please contact me, I’m here to help. 

Thank you for listening to MediaOnQ.

Hello and welcome to  Episode 4 Hyper Syndication Part 2.

My name is .

Today we are going to explore techniques that are useful for those of us who are content producers.  So if you create content for your blog, website, social media posts or even web video for  or …this will be right up your alley. 

This is part two of a two-segment . In part one, which is Media On Q Episode 3 Hyper Syndication Part 1, I share information with you about where exactly you can find your target audience as well as an overview of how RSS feeds can help you.

In part two, we’ll talk about how to target content to Computers, Tablets and Smart Phones and even Television sets. I’ll also share with you and possibly remind you about the important point in successful marketing and we’ll make sure to cover some tools that can help you keep everything running.

What’s the idea or functionality behind Hyper Syndication? 

Well, hyper syndication helps you create content once and distribute it across many digital platforms or in simple terms do more with less. 

While Hyper Syndication is a simple and straightforward process we’ll have to involve and use several different technologies to effectively execute this strategy.

What we’ll go over is how to piece these tools together in order to get the only thing that ever matters in marketing and that is RESULTS.

I run a digital media company in the Midwest called –.

My name is Carlos Quintero, Media On Q CEO and founder. Once again thank you for joining me.

Remember you can always share your comments or provide feedback directly at .

Targeting Computers

Let’s go over how to target computers.

With Hyper Syndication you should definitely want to target people while they are at their computer as this will most likely be the largest audience. 

Sure, I agree mobile phones need to be included. I will cover mobile next.

The fact is that most people spend a great deal or large percentage of their day sitting in front of a computer.

That is more time than any other activity in their day.

 So we’ll need to have a reliable content delivery solution that’s cross platform in place.  What I mean by cross platform is that we will be able to deliver the content to Mac, Windows and Linux computers. 

We don’t want to force people to download special plug-ins or apps so that they can consume our content.

Video content and the broad range of services that are readily available can help you target the computer audience.

With services like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook Video and Google+ Video Players you can upload your video to these services and know that they will provide great reliable cross platform delivery for your content.

There are several other services out there like Blip.tv and . What you’ll want to do is find video sharing services that offer their own set of Hyper Syndication tools making it easy for you to deliver your content.

It is important that you keep one thing in mind. We are living in a volatile market. In my career, I’ve seen many companies and services come and go…you don’t want to put all of your eggs into one basket and always remember to back up your files.

Another option that you will want to make readily available to your audience is a single click share option to their social media, email or blog. This simple convenience can rapidly extend your reach. 

One other area that you’ll want to pay attention to as you explore video sharing services is their distribution services. For example Blip.tv allows you to distribute directly to and also has the ability to target multiple devices all from a single interface making it easy to use. Needless to say, this is a major selling point for Blip.tv.

I will be brief with this point. I am going to guess that there is a high likelihood that you are not a lawyer or an attorney – I am going to suggest that you read the terms of service for any and all of the video or content sharing sites that you choose to use.

In short what you’ll find is simple. If you are using someone else’s network, servers and technology to deliver your content – you basically agree in very broad terms to allow them to use and distribute your video as they see fit.

It is not all bad…simply keep in mind that you will probably not own exclusivity rights to that content moving forward. Meaning, you are not going to make money off of the royalties and won’t be able to claim that someone took your idea and put a twist to it…

Here it is in a nutshell for you. Let’s take YouTube as an example. 48 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day…that is more video than what most of us can imagine.

Now, most of us know that Google owns YouTube…and neither YouTube nor Google have time for law suits, particularly from content providers…So in their terms of use and user generated content agreements, they make sure that they are protected.

Keep in mind that while I used YouTube as an example they are not the only company who takes these types of steps to protect themselves.

I only bring this up because if you have specific types of content that could generate royalties…it is worth you taking the time to consult with someone who has your rights and best interest in mind before you start publishing your content on the web.

The trade off on the positive side is that services like YouTube will compress your files so that they are available across all the various digital platforms and screen sizes… 

Targeting Portable Media Players 

There isn’t a better way to target portable media players than podcasting, in my opinion.

Now with  – there are a lot of things that you may not have thought about such as normalizing audio so that it sounds great in the car or through ear buds plugged directly into your phone.

If you are interested in learning all of the ins and outs on podcasting I would suggest that you look up  and  with  or  to Podcast with  both of those guys are incredibly selfless in the amount of information they share and frankly will help fast track you toward getting your podcast off the ground.   also offers podcast cover art services, which you may find useful.

While I am at this, it is also worth mentioning that if you need a  to your  you should check out  with .

The guys I’ve mentioned will all help you get your content ready for iTunes, and other podcast delivery sources as well as help you avoid the pitfalls that could hamper your delivery effectiveness. 

If you’re able to take advantage of what a well produced and delivered podcast can do, you will see results that will outperform every major television network’s delivery.

Why is that? 

The fact of the matter is that people who subscribe to podcast want the information on that very specific subject or niche.

The second best part about podcasting is the simple fact that it is still in it’s growth phase…which means there is very little competition…You can see why that would be a benefit right?

Another selling point for a podcast is the fact that this type of media can be consumed on the go…smart phone, car, bus, train, plane or boat…

And there’s more.

The podcast secret sauce is the fact that your audience will support you…consumes your content AND will share your content with others.

Now, who out there is independently wealthy enough to turn down free publicity and marketing?

Is there work involved? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.  Am I seriously asking you to consider podcasting? Yes.

So hopefully you are considering podcasting as a way to get your message and brand out there.

You’ll need to submit it to iTunes…that is one of the services where you’ll want your message to be made available and again to learn more search for and , as they will guide you ever step of the way. 

Make sure to pay attention to the requirements to submit to iTunes and the tips on how to be found on iTunes as well as how to ask for feedback…

If you choose to podcast, you will need a dedicated media host like Libsyn or PodHoster, there are more but again, if you take a moment and listen to The Audacity to Podcast or The Podcaster Studio they will give you a coupon code which you can use to get a free month of hosting from Libsyn.

There are two simple reasons as to why you would want to pay for podcast media files to be hosted.

The first is to receive the most accurate reports on your media’s consumption.

The second is frankly the ability to deliver the media in a reliable way to your audience…People don’t like to wait or tolerate struggling to get to the media they want…the web is all about how the user wants to use it and we need to do what it takes to make the user experience easy.

Targeting Television Sets

Let’s talk for a moment about how to most effectively target the holy grail of media – The Television Set.

That for most publishers has been sort of the Holy Grail…guess what, it is now easier to get into the living room than it ever has been before.

Seriously, it is.

Portable electronics can now push their content to television sets…making it much easier to reach the television.

Not to mention the smart TVs or DVD slash Blu-ray players, which can stream media from YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and other services.

With that said. It is important that you understand that there are some limitations toward delivering HD content to television devises.

If HD is what you have in mind you will have to make a decision between 720 and 1080.

Keep in mind that if you take the average living room size, more often than not 720 content will look better than 1080. 

The newest phones do support full 1080…but let’s use Apple TV as an example. If your content is formatted for 720 it will be delivered at 720. If you are delivering at 1080, it will be converted down to 720 before it hits the television set.

The only other factor is that producing and providing content at a full 1920x1080 will add cost…so you’ll have to make the decision as to what will be adequate enough for your brand’s message.

All this said, I believe that this is an area that will continue to get easier and easier to get into, so you should consider a host which will allow or make it easy for you to publish your content to television and Blu-ray players which support streaming media.

Now that we know it can be done…when it comes to delivering your content to television sets, one service stands out above all others and that is Blip.tv.

Granted, you would have to take advantage of their pro (meaning paid) offering which currently runs at $100 per year.

The upside – you log in to their control panel and you can target specific devices or networks.

Once logged in, you will see a tab that is labeled distribution. This will allow you to target multiple accounts.

For example, you will be able to target the Sony Network – Blue-ray players and television sets. 

You would have the chance to submit your content for approval.

While there is no guarantee that it would be approved; it is the easiest way to have the opportunity to submit your content to these major hardware companies.

Basically, what you are doing is petitioning to be accepted into their network. 

Picture this, Sony accepts your brand’s content; do you have any idea as to how many devices they produce and distribute in a year?  Your content can be on every single one of these devices…is it worth it?

I would argue that it is. 

The Importance of Branding

In this podcast I’ve talked about the importance of going where people are…that is Hyper Syndication.

Putting your content in social media services like Facebook Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and Blip.TV are all good ideas.

There is one thing you should keep in mind. All of the social media websites have their own branding strategy in place, which in summary will work toward bringing individuals back to their own websites.

What you’ll need to think about is visual branding.

Chances are you already have a logo and possibly a color palette that you use for your organization or product. 

Using that consistently throughout all that you do, your website, your blog, your video, your social media, your favicons…and so forth are all things that will make sure that people can find you.

While it may seem redundant to always be so rigid and think about branding but the fact of the matter is that it does matter.

You can’t be too blunt when it comes to .

You want people to know whom you are and where to find you period.

Now, I don’t mean flashing text and all sorts of obnoxious graphics, I mean a consistent look and feel to your brand, message and content.

You should always make sure that people know who you are, where you came from, what you are representing and how to get a hold of you.

Visual branding will help cover all of that.

Let’s for a moment talk about, having a call to action in your media’s branding message. A call to action is something that is critical in any and all media campaigns. 

A call to action tells your audience exactly what they need to do and how to get it done. 

When it comes to social media, you don’t want to give your audience too many choices. It’s not go to this website, follow us on Twitter, find us on Facebook, subscribe to our Podcast…that is simply too many action items.

You want to give your audience one maybe two things to do. If you go beyond that, you’re going to create confusion and potentially ruin your campaign and effort’s results.

If there is nothing else that you remember from this podcast, please remember this…

The modern media producer needs to engage their audience and get them involved. A clear call to action with one action item is the right way to do it.

Essential Tools to keep it All Running

Once you start hyper syndicating your content it will be awesome as it will be everywhere.

That is the good side of Hyper Syndication.  The other side would be that because your content is now spread across multiple platforms and web services…how do we get people back to your original content? 

This is where Lijit comes into play.

Lijit is a search engine that will tie all of your social networks together and provide a search engine, which is powered by Google to gather up the results pointing them back to your original content.

There is another plus to this cool tool. 

, will give you detailed analytics and stats specific to your content’s consumption.

I’ve yet to mention the best part.  is FREE.

RECAP

Hyper Syndication is a straightforward concept and process.

After listening to this podcast you’ve realized that using technology like  allow us to tie blogs, video-sharing sites, social media all together.

Remember, that what it really comes down to is having a consistent network. Once you take the time to set this network up, it’s not that hard.

Things can essentially run on autopilot.

This means you post once and it goes out to 10, 20, or even 50 different websites.

This is great because it serves the cardinal need, which is make sure that your message is delivered where your audience is.

Whether you’re an individual publisher, a small business or a large corporation, the use of hyper syndication techniques can go a really long way to extend your marketing brand message and promise.

Taking the time to set up the network is going to free up your publishing efforts, leaving you much more time to both create new content and respond or reply to all of the great new leads you’re attracting.

My name is .

Feel free to check out more on Hyper Syndication at .

Hello and welcome to Media On Q Episode 3 - Hyper Syndication Part 1.

My name is Carlos Quintero.

Today we are going to explore techniques that are useful for those of us who are content producers.  So if you create content for your blog, website, social media posts or even web video for YouTube or Vimeo…this will be right up your alley.

This will be a two-segment podcast given the amount of content that we’ll be covering. In part one, I will share information with you about where exactly you can find your target audience as well as an overview of how RSS feeds can help you.

In part two, we’ll talk about how to target content to Computers, Tablets and Smart Phones and even Television sets. I’ll also share with you and possibly remind you about the important point in successful marketing and we’ll make sure to cover some tools that can help you keep everything running. 

What’s the idea or functionality behind Hyper Syndication?

Well, hyper syndication helps you create content once and distribute it across many digital platforms or in simple terms do more with less.

We can all benefit a little from working less right?  That however does not mean we’d drop the ball…hyper syndication simply allow us to work more efficiently.

Ok so Hyper Syndication is a simple and straightforward process BUT, yep, there is a but…to execute on this effectively we’ll have to involve and use several different technologies. Oh and don’t worry – most of these are FREE.

What we’ll go over is how to piece these tools together in order to get the only thing that ever matters in marketing and that is RESULTS.

We can all agree on that fact. Results allow us to feel the rewards of our effort and also then help us determine where it is that we should spend out time.

Now the results I am sharing with you today are based on my own personal experience. 

I run a digital media company in the Midwest called – yes; you guessed it Media On Q.

I have a wide range of clients all over the United States…everything from small businesses, corporate clients, automotive dealership groups and large radio station groups.  I’ve helped them extend their reach well beyond traditional media and out too much broader audiences.

I’ve found that using these free tools is a great way to extend any project’s reach and all you have to do is put a little bit of effort toward building a network. You can then leverage that network and experience tremendous results. 

You need to know and understand that it will take a little bit of work…but the payoff is huge. 

Using technology like hyper syndication you can often eliminate things like replication, meaning printing costs, shipping and direct mail campaigns and instead leverage the power of the web to reach much broader audiences. 

My name is Carlos Quintero, Media On Q CEO and founder. We are going to dive right in to a bunch of hyper syndication techniques today. Once again thank you for joining me.

Remember you can always share your comments or provide feedback directly at mediaonq.com.

The exact methods and services that you will want to use for your hyper syndication project are going to vary based on who your target audience is or who you want to reach.

In order to understand your target, I think it would be useful to review and understand recent trends in Internet behavior.

It is no shock to us, I’m sure that over the past 10 years there has been a gigantic increase in internet content consumption. 

BTW – my stats come from Nielsen Research Studies. If you’re not familiar with Nielsen, they are a media research group and you can learn more about them at Nielsen.com.

Now back to Internet consumption stats. 

People say that the Internet is the most essential medium to their lives.

In this survey – 45% of adults said that the Internet is the last method that they would choose to give up to get their news and information.

Now if we break this down by age…it is even more impactful.

Of those people surveyed – those under 35, 66% or two thirds of them said they would not give up the internet period. They would rather drop movies, drop television, drop magazines, and drop the newspaper…basically they would drop everything except for the Internet.

The marketing take away here is …You Have To Target The Internet to experience Results. 

I get to see a lot of folks put a great deal of Money, Time and Effort into print (newspaper and local magazines), Billboards and direct mail campaigns.

While those have their place and do reach people…the Internet is really where they should be spending their time and efforts. 

So do yourself and your business a favor and really think about that. 

If you’re targeting or trying to reach people under the age of 45, you must use some sort of online delivery method. 

Think about this, just last week, 98 Million people in the United States watched a video online.

If we break that down into a percentage it means that 40% of us are watching online video. Oh and BTW – the United States is not the leader in these stats. Europe and Japan’s numbers are significantly higher.

It is important to understand just how much people want and expect online content.

All that said, when it comes to reaching people online people still get freaked out. 

What happens if my customer is not online? 

What happens if my fan for my show doesn’t have a good Internet connection?

Will they be able to see it?

Neilsen has an answer to that. When asked in the U.S.A., 9 out of 10 adults said they had the ability to get online whenever they want.

Now, it is important to realize that this might be at school or at their job but also know and understand that people have access to the Internet and can get on the Internet. 

In North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Japan there is easy and reliable access to the Internet.

So, no matter what you publish, you’re going to want to leverage the web. It does not matter if it’s news, entertainment or corporate communications You need to leverage the web.

One last point – and that is the extreme growth in social media. This will continue to grow. The key number to look at is the 18-24 year olds. 80% penetration into social media and as this group ages, you’re going to see them continue to use social media; meaning this number will spread to all age groups over time. 

So now that you understand where to find your target audiences, it’s time to think about whom you want to reach.

In the next segment, I’ll go over the specific techniques to target these audiences. 

Using RSS Feeds 

RSS is a great way to target a broad audience.

What’s RSS – RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication.

What exactly does RSS do, you might ask?

Well the goal with Real Simple Syndication is to get subscribers.

Once you’ve captured a subscriber, you can continue to market, entertain or keep them informed Without having to spend additional dollars in an effort draw them back to you.

A subscriber will continue to get your information until they physically unsubscribe.

As a content producer, this simply means that your subscribers will receive ALL of the content you produce and distribute through RSS – And That Is Really Useful.

RSS has the ability to feed your social media making it a necessary tool in your hyper syndication strategy.

With that said, let’s take a look at two helper type of applications that will make it possible for you to take any RSS feed and push it out to your social media outlets.

We’ll start with Twitterfeed. And guess what? Twitterfeed is FREE, well at least it is as of the time of this recording.

The benefit with Twitterfeed is that you can take your RSS feed and push it out to your social media.  

So, if you have a YouTube channel or a Vimeo account you’ll have the ability to publish your content from one feed on to the multiple accounts.

Some of you are probably thinking, why not simply sync the accounts. While it is possible to sync your YouTube, Facebook and Twitter account – using Twitterfeed allows you to sync multiple accounts as in more than one Facebook page.

This is worth noting given that lots of businesses dove in to social media because of individuals, without having a roadmap or strategy in place leaving them with individual pages vs. business pages or multiple individual pages or business pages and accounts.

The Twitterfeed process is as simple as copying your RSS feed and pasting it into the Twitterfeed account.

Once you do that, you will have the ability to push the content to Facebook, Twitter and Linked in as well as a few other services.

Once again, the key with this tool is the ability to push the content to multiple Facebook and multiple Twitter accounts.

Another useful syndication service is HootSuite. Unlike Twitterfeed, HootSuite is a paid service…well it is a paid service if you want to take advantage of all of their features. They do offer a free version and this free version is not a bad place to test drive the service.

The reason why I like HootSuite is because it takes Hyper Syndication and makes it easy.

HootSuite also allows you to connect multiple social media accounts but adds one important feature and that is the ability to schedule your posts. 

This is a huge benefit, because you can target your messages to different groups of people. For example, you’ll reach a different group of individuals at 8am Central Time in the East Coast, Midwest and West Coast. So you might want to give it some thought as to when you Tweet or post a status update so that important messages don’t get overlooked or flat out get missed by your target audience.

While we are on the subject of posts and status updates. I would strongly recommend that when you post links back to your own landing pages or websites that you use a link shorting service like tinyurl.com or ow.ly

Back to HootSuite, some features include the ability to add multiple users to share accounts and collaborate and one of my favorite features are their reports.

HootSuite will generate a weekly report for you with a great deal of detail about your social media networks and your assets or content.

In this report you’ll be informed about how often your content was consumed or republished to other websites.

So for me the five dollars and some change it cost a month is more than worth it and a great tool for the modern media producer.

RECAP 

Hyper Syndication is a straightforward concept and process.

After listening to this podcast you’ve realized that using technology like RSS Feeds allow us to tie blogs, video-sharing sites, social media all together.

Remember, that what it really comes down to is having a consistent network. Once you take the time to set this network up, it’s not that hard.

Things can essentially run on autopilot.

This means you post once and it goes out to 10, 20, or even 50 different websites.

This is great because it serves the cardinal need, which is make sure that your message is delivered where your audience is.

Whether you’re an individual publisher, a small business or a large corporation, the use of hyper syndication techniques can go a really long way to extend your marketing brand message and promise.

Taking the time to set up the network is going to free up your publishing efforts, leaving you much more time to both create new content and respond or reply to all of the great new leads you’re attracting.

This concludes Hyper Syndication Part 1.

In Part 2, we’ll cover how to target content to computers, mobile media devices like the iPad and iPhone as well as how to get your video on real living room television sets.

My name is Carlos Quintero.

Feel free to check out more on Hyper Syndication and a wide variety of digital media branding content at MediaOnQ.com.

Hello and welcome to  episode 2. Best Practices to Grow Your Web Business

I’m Carlos Quintero. In this episode we will cover three great tips that will help you create a  so that you can turn your expense also know as a cost center into a profit center.

My goal in this episode is to answer a question that my clients often ask and that is; Are there ? And if so, what are they?  

While there's no one right answer, my advice has always been to focus on two things. First, focus on creating high quality content. Second, focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your website.  

I will include a full transcript of this episode in the show notes which can be found at mediaonq.com – that’s media on q the letter q dot com, to make it easy for you to reference should you find the information useful.

Also if you’d like to share your thoughts on this subject you can post your comments below the show page notes found on .

All right – so let’s get started. I will cover three key suggestions on how to design and organize your website content with an overall emphasis on quality. 

Tip #1

Don't create multiple pages or sites with duplicate content.

I’d like to encourage you to create high quality sites rather than a large quantity of sites.

Focusing on one site and making it richer in information and authentic in content not only benefits users, but also helps you .  

Think of yourself as a consumer of the product, service or information that you are providing. As you’re browsing the web, you want and expect to find what you're looking for quickly and easily without combing through endless multiple pages, subdomains, or sites with generic or duplicate content.

So if you have pages in your website or multiple websites that offer similar content, I would advice you to consider consolidating the pages or sites into one effectively eliminating the duplication.

You’ll be glad you did it, Google should reward you with  and your website visitors will be more likely to recommend your product, service or content. 

Tip #2

Provide content that gives users a reason to visit, and return, to your site. 

When you create content on your site, it’s important to ask yourself if the page provides substantial value or service when compared to sites covering similar subjects.

I’ll share a quick story from my personal experience. As a web designer and developer with  I’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide range of clients. This one particular client is a group of 6 radio stations based out of Fargo, North Dakota. I was brought in to help the group establish websites and digital identities in a way that would allow them to generate revenue or monetize their digital identities.

The first order of business was an analysis of their existing platforms from a revenue perspective. I know, it seems a little counter intuitive to start on the revenue side but once I understood their expense I was able to determine what was possible. 

The second thing I analyzed was their position in the market and frankly how they stacked up against their competitors.

The third step was to identify key individuals within their organization that would help us reach our goals

Through this process we determined that they were spending a great deal of money and seeing very little if any results from it 

We also discovered that their key competitor was the local newspaper who has a large number of writers on staff.

The most important and biggest item that we discovered in this process is the fact that 8 out of 10, sometimes more than that, the Radio station was the media source that broke local news stories or brought attention to local issues. 

That single fact was more than enough ammunition to leverage the radio group into a competitive position in the market. 

Why…how…some might ask?

The answer is simple.

Because it is original content and content is king on the web.

This radio group was able to take original content, which they produce daily for their over-the-air work and repurpose it for the web. 

Their stories are not newspaper type of articles but rather consumable web stories that allow the message to be delivered quickly and effectively.

In the end, this group added their audio and even video coverage to their news stories giving them the ability to compete with the local market’s television news coverage.

In fact, the local television stations often requested permission to use their content (audio, video and photos) in their own news coverage.  In other words, they became THE NEWS SOURCE for the community.

Like the news station, each of the other 5 radio stations also found their unique identity and place on the web and shared equal success. 

Through the right mix of  and content this radio group effectively took their interactive platform from a cost center to a profit center.

The marketing take-away here is: 

YES it is worth the effort to create original content that sets your site apart from the rest. This will provide useful search results and keep your visitors coming back.  

Tip #3

Provide the information or service promised. 

It seems obvious right? So, why am I saying this? 

Working in the web design and development field, I get to see a lot of things and frankly some publishers create sites that appear to offer a product or service, but instead trick users into navigating through several pages. They are trying to increase their site’s page views thereby generating more impressions for their ads.  

It’s happened to all of us at least once I would say. We are searching for a product, service or some sort of content and end up on a site that makes it impossible to get the information we were after.

While it would seem obvious that this sort of activity on your website is not a good strategy, consider this. Your goal should never be to create a negative user experience.  You also don’t want your site to be .

Here’s a quick  for you. Use keywords appropriately and in context with your content and make sure users are able to easily navigate through the site to find the products, services, or information your site promised.

There’s no shortcut to success. Building a high quality website takes effort and time.

So remember the three tips to help you build great websites with an emphasis on quality and content.

1.    Don’t create multiple pages or sites with duplicate content.

2.    Provide content that gives users a reason to visit, and return, to your site. 

3.    Provide the information or service promised.

If you have any questions or would like additional information feel free to leave me a voice mail on the Media On Q studio line 701-205-1497. 

OR if you prefer Twitter you can find me at #CarlosCue that is # or Pound Sign Carlos C U E. 

Share your thoughts, comments or make a show content suggestion at mediaonq.com or 701-205-1497 or on twitter #CarlosCue - CUE

I wand to share this with you…it has been my experience, almost every time that my client’s have focused on their users A.K.A website visitors instead of finding ways to circumvent content creation or worse taking the easy way out by publishing syndicated content on their sites…they experience long-term revenue success, making them real winners.

Join me next week where we’ll continue to explore digital media hyper syndication – making it easy for you to deliver your brand’s message across all available digital platforms.

If you’d like more information on digital media marketing strategy please visit mediaonq.com

I’m Carlos Quintero. Thank you for listening to .

In this episode, we will go over how to  to improve  or SEO as it is commonly referred to in the  and web developmentcommunity.

When people go online to search for the sorts of products, services or information you provide, they can find YOU or they can find YOUR competitors. 

My goal here is to help you understand a critical area of , and that is how to connect with people through search engines.

I’ll show you the components you should definitely include in your website and more importantly those that you should really stay away from.

If location is important for your business, I’ll explain how local search results and local information can really help you grow.

Media On Q is designed to help you dig through the clutter to help you figure out what makes sense and what is important.

Let’s begin by 

In the ideal situation, you should think about SEO before the website has been built.

In most cases  is an afterthought. Something done to websites once they’ve been finished.

This is definitely not the perfect situation but that is most often the way it is.

Most of my clients come to me looking for help after they’ve already .

I know many companies and small businesses out there are in this exact situation.

So, let’s assume that you already have a website. A website that you’ve inherited a website from a previous employee at your company, a site that you built yourself or vendor built for you.  Regardless, it is probably a site that was built without thinking about .

Now here we are…you want your .

Luckily, all is not lost. You can in most cases,  to make it more search engine friendly.

It is often possible to take a website that appears to be nowhere on the search engines and make a few modifications here and there and start to see real significant improvement. 

It is important that I point out one thing…it is by far cheaper to build it correctly in the first place…but we can’t really go back and change history.

So, I’ll go over what to look for, modify and change to make your website more search engine friendly…

In today’s web economy there are only two important search engines to worry about…Google and Bing…

If you get your site into those search engines and rank well…then you are doing well with search engines that provide search results for most of the world’s searches…in particular 97% or more of search engine results for individuals in North America.

What about Yahoo?

Yahoo gets their results from Bing…

What about AOL, EarthLink and Comcast?   

These search engines get their results from Google.

Doing well with Google and Bing…will help you do well with most search sites… 

Also important to note…the things you do to  will help you improve your results for the other search engines like Ask.com.

A question that comes up often is what does optimizing a Site really mean?

Think of it as a first date. Yes, there are some first dates that are not all that memorable…So in this first date, what we are trying to do is put our best foot forward…we want to make it memorable…in marketing terms, we want to make it sticky…

How do we do that?

Well we structure our sites and creating search engine content in such a way that we are optimally positioned in search engine results…so that when someone searches for your business’ products, services or information your website ranks at the top or near the top of the search results.

Let’s put this into perspective for a moment.  The job of the search engines is to figure out which pages out of more than a TRILLION are the most suitable ones to present to the search results.

How do search engines do it?

They essentially do it in two ways.

The first is to look at the text on the web pages.  I know, for many people and businesses, text or  is something they would like to stay away from…but it is necessary and we’ll cover this more in depth in a future episode.

The second thing search engines look for is the number of …

I want to make a point to say that these two items are not the ONLY items that affect SEO rankings…because the search engines literally have hundreds of criteria that they are searching for…these are simply two of the most important.

Other criteria that search engines look for include key words and where the key words are placed…for instance, are they in the page name, the title, page headings or body tags…how are the words formatted? Bold, Italic, top of the page or bottom of the page…and so on.

As I’ve mentioned, there are hundreds of criteria that the search engines are looking at to determine where a page should rank.

Unfortunately, the search engine companies like Google or Bing don’t disclose the criteria, which leads to a mass amount of misinformation in this business.

There is so much hidden information that it makes it difficult for businesses to invest in the time and energy needed to figure out what works best…

The whole process is like engineering without understanding the laws of physics…Oh and by the way…the laws change every few weeks.

You may have heard that  and it is a full time job to try and keep up…that is partially true.

The  however – NEVER CHANGE.

I have clients who ranked well years ago and still rank well today. 

Forget SEO for a moment:

Sometimes  is not the problem with a website. Website viewers are incredibly selective so your site must meet some minimum standards before .

 Let me give you a couple of examples from my experience to prove the point.

A few years ago a new client came to me and said, we need more search engine traffic.  I went to the website, looked at it and I had to make the difficult call to tell him, that he did not need more search engine traffic, but rather he needed a new website.

His website frankly looked like it was built by an amateur…As it turned out, the client was getting a fair amount of search engine traffic but he was not getting many calls.  At the time he was selling only over the phone.

When he did get calls he got a lot of questions…people wanted to know where he got his products and weather or not they were any good – OUCH right?

When I see websites that don’t have the professional look and finish to them, I immediately know that it simply will not work. It will never matter how much website traffic is generated, that particular site will simply never succeed.

Who built this site, I asked the client…your nephew or was it the office manager?  My client then responded with not quite the office manager, it was Joe the warehouse manager.

Obviously, we .

And immediately to use the client’s words the phone started ringing off the hook.

They were not calling to ask the client questions but rather to place orders. 

You need to be honest about this issue. Visit your website and make an honest assessment, would you trust the site? Would you buy from this website? Is your site professional looking? Is your site UGLY? 

An ugly or unprofessional looking website won’t work well period.

Your site is your face to the world. So if it looks like an amateur built it, it conveys the impression that your business is run by armatures.

Just a few weeks ago, a friend told me that she was looking for a photographer for her wedding.  She’s been looking online. She said that when she lands on an amateurish looking website she simply hits the back button. She knows that the photographer might still be good, but hey she says…that’s just what I do.

Here’s a quick little experiment find 5 competitors to your business…Load them into different tabs in your web browser. Then load yours into yet another tab and move from tab to tab pausing briefly at each site. Now be honest, would you buy from your site?

If the answer is NO then you are going after the wrong cause…

It will not matter how much you . If it doesn’t create the right impression it won’t work.

One other issue is usability. If your site is confusing or makes it hard to get things done; again, optimizing the site may not be the most important thing right now.

There is no point in bringing people to the site if they’ll get frustrated and leave.

I wanted to bring attention to these issues, as they are more common than you’d think.

Join me next week where we’ll continue to discuss how to encourage search engines to  through SEO techniques.