Know Your Plan
It is always important to know why and what you are going to do before you do it, otherwise you are being blown by the wind. Identifying which social networks best serve your interests and where your best chances are to make an impact on the public is a first step. Twitter and Facebook are givens, but you may find that SoundCloud is a great fit for you, or Pinterest. The more sites you can use effectively the better, but if you get no engagement from the site, move on. You also need to know what you want to accomplish there. Remember that throwing out links and ads left and right is not good social etiquette, you have to be real and engage.

Listen More, Talk Less
You must seek out your audience by monitoring sites for key words and phrases that relate to your mission. If they are mentioning your name, even better. If you are a company that sells patio grills and accessories, you might search sites for mentions of cooking, grilling, recipes, barbecues, or similar things. Once you find people talking about subjects that relate to what you do, you can follow or friend them and start engaging. Once you do engage, promote yourself, but don’t cram it down their throat. Just be friendly with them, and throw in what you can when it comes up.

Recruit Promoters
Once you are engaged, get your new friends to work for you by issuing campaign challenges, asking questions that people can answer and want to answer (these don’t have to be about your business), etc. You can then turn the conversation to something related to your business and attempt to get feedback. This builds the bond. The more you can create a give and take instead of just a give, the better the chance you can get your people to “like” you, retweet you, and generally become brand evangelists for you.

Social means Social
Again, don’t send out links about your latest promotion every hour. A social media site is exactly that, a place for conversations and casual engagement. If you try to convert your Facebook page to your sales floor, you will lose people quickly. There must be a great deal of tact employed with your engagement, finding the right balance between promotion and conversation. Try to think of it as hanging out with your friend and trying to get them to do something for you. You have to spend a lot more time buttering them up than throwing your sales pitch at them. If the relationship is built right, th rest comes easily.

Measure Success 
There are simply too many people you will be exposed to to be able to track them by memory or with ticks on a page with a pencil. You will need a solid piece of social media management software to do the job right. The right dashboard gives you the numbers and analytics you need to effectively track how your engagement is increasing traffic and promoters. After all, it’s all about your ROI, and if you aren’t tracking that, then why are you doing it in the first place?

According to Website Magazine, the rankings are based on the following methodology:

Website Magazine’s Top 50 rankings are a measure of a website’s popularity. Ranks are calculated using a proprietary method that focuses on average daily unique visitors and page views over a specified period of time, as reported by multiple data sources. The website with the highest combination of factors is ranked in the first position.
 

Below is the complete list of companies:

1. Adobe.com
2. infusionsoft.com
3. zoho.com
4. rackspace.com
5. vertex42.com
6. carbonite.com
7. silverpop.com
8. 37signals.com
9. freshbooks.com
10. successfactors.com
11. woopra.com
12. marketo.com
13. wordstream.com
14. brightedge.com
15. Mozy.com
16. rightnow.com
17. egnyte.com
18. ibusinesspromoter.com
19. taleo.com
20. whoson.com
21. onestat.com
22. sugarcrm.com
23. outright.com
24. Crashplan.com
25. salesforce.com
26. hubspot.com
27. netsuite.com
28. atinternet.com
29. webtrends.com
30. coremetrics.com
31. dynamics.com
32. getclicky.com
33. webceo.com
34. ektron.com
35. eloqua.com
36. crazyegg.com
37. clicktale.com
38. piwik.org
39. clickdensity.com
40. 10gen.com
41. xero.com
42. engineyard.com
43. commence.com
44. blinksale.com
45. zuora.com
46. adaptiveplanning.com
47. aprimo.com
48. sendible.com
49. salesboom.com
50. liveperson.com

1. The ability to edit sentiment and relevancy for a given mention
Sendible’s sentiment analyzer is great, but there are times when it gets it wrong. You now have the ability to edit the sentiment score for a given mention. We understand that some mentions may be irrelevant and we’ve introduced the ability to mark posts as irrelevant so that they do not appear in your reports and mention results.

2. The ability to integrate your Google Alerts feed
Creating Google Alerts for your business or keywords is a great way to keep updated whenever Google’s crawlers come across a mention of your brand. You now have the ability to add your Google Alerts feed into Sendible so that Sendible is also notified whenever Google comes across a mention of your business. 

3. Tracking of new services including Google+, GetSatisfaction, Blekko and IceRocket
We have been extending our mention crawler to include mentions of your business from new sites such as Google+ and GetSatisfaction. If you have any suggestions for other sites you’d like to see crawled, please leave them in the comments below or send us an email.

4. Searchable results
We have added a search box so that you can now search your mentions streams.

1. Find a mention or post that you would like to assign to a team member so that they can respond.
2. Select the little drop down menu on the far right and click Assign.

3. You will then be able to enter a message and select which team member the post should be assigned to.

4. The team member will receive an email notification, informing them that a task has been assigned to them.

5. They can then respond to the task from within Message Box > Tasks. They can also collaborate on the task and post comments/questions.

6. Once they’ve responded to the task, they click Mark Done and the user that originally assigned the task will be notified that the task has been completed.

To configure a workflow for a user, follow the steps below:
1. If you haven’t already done so, sign up for a Sendible account that allows you to manage multiple users/clients. For more information on how to manage multiple clients with Sendible, see this short video)
2. Go to My Users and either create a new user or edit an existing one.
3.  You will now see an Approval Worfklow section. Click edit to define who this user needs approval from before they can publish content.

4. Follow the steps to Save or Create the user.
5. Now, when this user creates their content from the Message Box, they will see a Submit For Approval button.
6. The user has the ability to add a message/comment that will be sent to the user from whom they require approval. This user will receive a notification, informing them that they need to either approve or reject the content.

So how do they work out this score? The Klout algorithm is quite clever, it takes into account three statistics , True Reach, amplification and network score before working its magic and coming up with a number based off of these figures.

True Reach is basically the size of a person’s actively engaged audience. That is the number of followers that regularly interact with the users social profile in the form of reading, clicking links and responding to content.

Amplification is used to gauge how valuable or viral the content you offer is. This is judged based on how probable the person’s content is likely to be acted upon i.e. retweeted, commented, liked etc.

Network score is based on how influential the users engaged audience are. For instance if a celebrity with a high Klout is a member of a person’s engaged audience than that persons score is likely to benefit a fair amount from it.

In order to achieve a reasonably high score you need to keep track on and improve all three of these metrics. It doesn’t matter if you produce a lot of content and have a large audience if what you spread is worthless your amplification score will suffer. The best way of reaching a high level is to produce content people find valuable, your audience will then spread it on for you and your number of followers will grow. In the mean time keeping an eye out for other influential users and engaging with them will only likely increase your score further.

But why is this number important and why is it worth tracking? While its accuracy has sometimes been questioned by some it is generally considered the best method of determining whether you’re social media campaigns are going well and provides a clear and quantifiable number that is easy to follow.

Outside of tracking your own performance it is also a useful metric that can be used to evaluate others or for them to evaluate you. This can come in handy when you want to spread your message as far as possible. For instance if you were in the process of advertising your product, you could approach users with higher Klout scores and ask them for a review.

Their message due to their large active following will spread far wider than if the message had been passed on by the average user. Klout provides a simple way of identifying who these “influencers” are. This method of advertising has been practised by a few companies and is growing in popularity. One example of a company doing just that was when Audi asked designers with high Klout scores to come and test drive their new A8 model at an exclusive San Francisco event, and I’m sure most of them obliged.

So if you are not doing so already, make sure you keep an eye on this statistic or you will be passing up on a very useful measure for your success.

1. Attribution Links

Several social media management tools, such as Sendible.com, allow you to include attribution links along with your posts. These are little customizable links that appear below your updates and can contain any text you like. They can also link to any website you like. In the example below, we’ve included the link “Visit our blog” below the post.

2. Branded Facebook Posts

It is also possible to include your company name below every update you send to Facebook. So, instead of seeing “via mobile” or “via Sendible”, your posts could display “via My Company” with a little square icon alongside. This is a great way to build up your brand awareness and have Facebook users click on your company name and go directly to your website. The option for branded Facebook posts is currently a feature offered by Sendible.

3. Scheduling

To ensure the best possible chance of having your Facebook posts noticed, you should schedule your posts to be published at the time your fans are most likely to be looking at their Facebook news feed. There are various tools out there that make it easy to schedule your Facebook updates.

4. Link Previews

Another easy way to engage your Facebook fans is by creating interesting link previews. Link previews are made up of a thumbnail, title, caption and description. These details appear whenever you post a link to Facebook. Certain 3rd party social media management products, such as Sendible.com, make it easy to customize these details so that you can make your link previews more descriptive, resulting in better click-through rates.

5. Facebook Photo Albums

Another great way to gain more views and click-throughs, is by posting several photos to a new or existing Facebook Photo Album on your Facebook Page. Facebook Photo Albums are known to generate more click-throughs on a news feed and therefore, higher levels of engagement. You can use a social media dashboard to help you to schedule these Facebook Album posts ahead of time for maximum engagement. Here is an article from our blog that explains how to do this using Sendible.

6. Geotargeting

In Facebook, users disclose a lot of relevant information about themselves – for example their age, gender, location, work history, language etc. As a Facebook Page administrator, you have the ability to deliver content that’s only relevant to specific fans. Since you are targeting specific fans by location or language, you can customize your content to generate the most engagement for the subset of fans that are being targeted. Click here to see how easy it is to target specific fans using a third party social media management tool.

I recently read the following post implying that the levels of engagement on Facebook are reduced when using third party social media management tools. From our analysis, this is completely untrue and we have seen the exact opposite effect with users on our social media platform. By using third party applications, such as Sendible, for scheduling, geotargeting and branding their Facebook updates, brands are in fact seeing higher click-through rates, building better brand awareness and dramatically increasing their engagement ratio. To sign up for a free Sendible trial, visit http://sendible.com/signup.

1. Sign into your Wistia account, create your video project and upload your videos.

2. Select a video and click Embed.

3. Select “For Email Marketing”

4. Copy the Video merge tag and open up your Sendible message box.

5. Select the HTML view on the message editor and insert the code into your HTML editor.

6.Click Update and you’ll be ready to send your message.