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If you use social media for business rather than a leisure chat with your social friends you should follow certain unwritten rules of social conduct.

Many of those rules are “unwritten” simply due to the nature of social media marketing as an industry – it’s very young and has a long way to go until it matures. So the rules I am talking about are derived from my daily practice as the director of digital marketing for social media firm where we help businesses to develop social media strategies and grow their presence in various social media networks.

Earlier I wrote about the right mindset that would help you to expand your business through social networks and to avoid some serious mistakes that could be deadly for your online reputation:

Today we’ll look at online reputation from a different angle.

Online Reputation Management

Whether you’re aware or not, your social activity affects not only you and your business, it reflects on your social friends as well. It’s a two-way street. Your social connections play an active role in a growth and perceived value of your social networks and at the same time you influence their online reputation.

Let’s illustrate this statement by a few examples.

When your social friends say something good about you and your business on a social site, this message could be seen by any of their friends, and these friends might want to check you out too and then tell their own social connections about you, and so on.

The same is true when you post positive messages about your friends. Your mentions will help them in their social media campaigns.

More subtle example would be helping your friends by mentioning them in different lists and liking their social profiles, fan pages, etc.

Each time you list a twitterer, her/his profile will be seen by tweeps who follow this particular list, plus any of your friends can click the link to the list anytime, and see who you placed there.

And if you have over 60,000 friends (like I do), placing in one of your lists could result in a substantial exposure.
You can create lists on Twitter manually or you can automate the process based on various criteria using various social media applications such as Formulist.

On Formulist you can list people who mention or retweet you the most, who are the most liked by your fans or followers, lists of tweeps who are similar to you, etc.

I like to reward people who often retweets my messages. So one of my lists automatically add tweeps who retweet me the most often.

With Facebook you can do a similar trick – if you “like” somebody’s profile or fan page, it will be seen by all your friends.

Those are example of positive influence.

Sure, you can use the same tools to create negative lists and mentions (about tweeps who suck, for example), but in most cases you probably wouldn’t want to do this to your social friends, wouldn’t you? Negativity won’t get you too far in a social game.

Unfortunately, you can hurt your social friends unintentionally jeopardizing your social relationships. And I would be glad to show you how to avoid this costly mistake.

Social Media Applications

You’re familiar with social media applications, right? Those little games you play on Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and other social sites. Those mobile apps you use to update status, share pictures and browse social outlets through your smart phones.

All of them require certain privileges to access and update your profile.

The majority of users who like certain social media application just give all required permissions without a second thought.

Whereas it’s up to you whether to grant a permission to retrieve your contact information or publish on your wall, there are other privileges that you have no morale right to grant.

A few days ago I was approached by a marketer who suggested me to download a certain social application. Application looked promising and seemed to provide a valuable functionality. Yet, before it could be used, I was required to grant it certain permissions.

Here are the permissions I was supposed to grant:

• Access my basic information (Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I’ve shared with everyone)
• Send me email (the application may email me directly at my contact email)
• Post to my Wall (the application may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall)
• Access my data any time (the application may access my data when I’m not using it)
• Access my profile information (Birthday, Current City and Website)
• Access my contact information (Online Presence)
• Access my photos and videos (Photos Uploaded by Me)
• Access my friends’ information (Birthdays, Current Cities, Online Presence, Websites and Photos)

Whether you allow an app to retrieve your location and birthday, send you email and post at your wall wherever it wants, this decision is obviously up to you.

Yet you have absolutely no right to share the private information about your friends. Your friends trusted you with this information, it doesn’t mean you can share it with the entire world ((unless you asked them all and they gave you permission to do so, which is unlikely).

Among my social friends there are public figures (politicians, celebrities and business leaders) and I know for sure that they wouldn’t appreciate me sharing the details about their private lives.

So be very careful with social media applications. If you give too many privileges, you violate the privacy of your social friends.

It’s not only unethical, it can very well backfire and hinder your social relationships. Not mentioning your online reputation.

Another potential threat worth mentioning is when users share links to “free prizes” and similar applications thus serving as an unwitting “social virus”.

Facebook implemented WOT reputation ratings to protect users from scams and malware.

Summary: Social media networks can not only help you to grow your social media presence and increase your brand awareness, they can also hurt your social and business relationships if used without proper care.

Opening image from Intersection Consulting on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

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More information on reputation management and social media as a business:

6 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Social business vs. social media

Not long ago twitter introduced a new feature – ability to classify people you follow by categories. But instead of making pre-defined categories, they let users to create them, calling them “lists”.

I was invited to beta-test this feature before it was released to the general public, and share my feedback. Now I’m sharing my thoughts about twitter lists with you.

Categorization is very important for any established network, especially social network. Yet the correct dichotomy of complex category trees and the optimal definition of tree nodes are not trivial matters at all. So instead of making up artificial categories, twitter essentially created a social poll letting people “vote” for their favorite categories.

Each list (or category) created by individual twitter could count as one vote. So the more people create lists with the same name, the more weight this name will probably carry as the candidate for particular node definition.

Twitter harnesses the collective brain power of its users to build complete modern schema of social flow. All they need now is a relatively simple program to conduct statistic analysis of node’s relations and relevancy. Brilliant!

This is only one of possible applications for twitter lists.

Another application is also pertained to voting, but in different way. Before twitter introduced twitter lists, the only voting mechanism available on twitter was related to RTs (re-tweets). I discussed the actual role of twitter RTs in the previous article.

Yet, many social networks have at least 2 different voting modules. In Facebook, for example, you can “like” somebody’s post, you can write a comment, and you can become a fan of friend’s page or community, essentially voting for it, since all your friends see that you joined that micro-community.

So, with introduction of twitter lists, twitter created a second voting option. Twitter user can place up to 500 people on the list, and create up to 20 different lists. If you follow more than 10000 tweeple, you can easily miss the updates from tweeps that (in your opinion) have the most knowledgeable/interesting/provocative tweets on that topic of interest.

Twitter lists allow to tone-down all that noise and clutter of general twitter communications, and really follow the updates of people that you think are worthy of special attention.

How is this relevant to voting? Well, if tweeple placed someone on the list, they essentially voted for that person. They voted that s/he has something to say, and is valuable for the community.

The more people placed you on the list, the higher is your weight in the community.

I’m pretty sure that search engines will soon add this parameter to their authority calculation algorithms and will pay attention to it when defining the SERP rankings of a particular record (notice, I said record, not web page, since now there are many different formats of indexed information, and “page” can be applied to only a few of them) . Of course, this new parameter should only be used in combination with others.

Here is the third application for twitter lists. (This one could be short-lived since many SEO specialists will soon use it to their advantage, and probably abuse it to death).

For now, you can estimate the value of your own twitter account by looking at the number of lists that you’re in (not financial value, the value of your information.) It should not be estimated as the constant. Information-wise, the account listed on thousands of lists may be less valuable then the account listed on only 10 lists or so. When defining the information value of my different twitter accounts, I use the following formula. You should be listed on the number of lists equal or more than 0.1% of the number of your followers.

Hence, if you have 10000 followers, you should be listed at least on 10 lists. If you’re not, then your account probably doesn’t provide enough value for your followers. You’re not helping your community, and you should quickly do something about it.

Review your tweets. I personally hate useless “bathroom break”-kind of tweets. Yet maybe you’re a part of the community that likes them. Even if this is the case, low listing ratio signals that you might need to deviate from your current tweeting pattern.

Of course the three list applications mentioned above is only a tip of the iceberg. The main point of this article is not only to show you the usefulness of this new twitter feature, but also to demonstrate that for many new features in social networks there are possibly hundreds of possible applications that nobody thought of. Use those applications to promote your brand, establish your authority, and help your social network communities.

P.S. I hope you find this post useful for your SEO and social marketing. If you want more up-to date SEO and Social Media info, signup for Social Media Secrets Newsletter using the signup form at the top right part of this blog, or go to www.web-feed.com .

Yes, I know that Twitter and Facebook are 2 different legal entities. But for the purposes of SEO and social marketing they are like twins, they complete each other.  And ideally they should only be used in combination. You initiate your acquaintance through Twitter, then send your friends to Facebook to nurture this new relationship, share photos, comments, etc.

Both social networks play ever growing role as a sources for social proof and authority. It’s not just a coincidence that Google SERP algorithm now gives even higher weights to the links coming from such sites.

In fact, both Google and Bing (finally worthy search engine from Microsoft!) both now have a non-exclusive agreement with Twitter and Facebook for using their live-time updates in the SERPs.

It does make a lot of sense. People on Twitter and Facebook share the most recent information with each other, something that is as close to “fresh meat” as you can get.
And in the light of these news Twitter RTs now play a very special role. In order to determine tweet’s position in the SERPs, both search engines now take in consideration (for their SERP algorithms) such parameters as number of Rts for the particular tweet and the number of followers of the person who posted the message or RTed.

The more followers the account has, the bigger is weight assigned to tweet, the more RTs the higher is importance.

For those who don’t know what RTs are, they are re-tweets, special commands used on Twitter to share with your followers’ posts published by your friends.

In other words, when somebody thinks that your tweets are worthy reading, and follows you, when you post a tweet in your account, your follower sees it instantly within her/his Twitter account.

So if you tweet something that is re-tweeted by other tweeple, all their followers will see your update. This means your message will be repeated again and again.

Facebook has similar option, but instead of re-sending the message to your followers, you can vote for the message(“like” it), which is essentially the same. All your followers see the message that you voted up. The more “likes” for the message, the bigger the weight assigned to it. Simple.

While RT parameter makes sense, the number of followers is debatable as a valid estimator of tweet’s importance.

Let’s take a closer look. Since both search engines pay a lot of attention to real time posts and events, the more Rts the tweet has, the higher is frequency of its appearance in live time search within the twitter for particular keywords, and hence the more weight will be assigned to this tweet for this keyword. That’s where presumably the “Rt  frequency” or “number of RTs” as a new parameter for SERP’s relevancy derived from.

But if tweeter just started recently, s/he won’t have many followers. However this use may be a real pro in particular industry s/he tweets about, and her/his opinion might be well worth listening too. Plus user can provide a lot of valuable resources and information on the topic. Yet s/he won’t get big weight simply because the account is young.

Sure, the more mature is the account and more followers it has, the more authority it carries (potentially). Yet this leaves an operating space for spammers, and the logic is flawed.

Hopefully search engines will find more suitable parameter for this purpose soon.

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