Automated Marketing Stream

Transcription

1 Automated Marketing Stream Tweet while you Sleep Introduction Thanks for downloading this ebook. I hope you find it helpful. For more great marketing tips, be sure to follow us on Twitter.com/MarketingStream. In this simple easy to follow ebook, I ll show you how you can use free web based tools to: 1) Automate your tweeting with relevant content to grow your followers. 2) Find relevant content to auto-tweet that your follows will like and Re-tweet. 3) Automate your marketing stream to syndicate your content to Facebook, Tumblr and other social networks while you focus on other more important things. As a bonus, I ll show you other ways to automate all kinds of tasks to help you do more with less so you can focus on the important tasks. To help with illustrating the ideas and tips in this ebook, I m going to use a fictitious company in the examples. We ll go through the steps from the beginning to end for this sample company with the idea that you can replicate the process with your own business or niche. Example Company Profile Best Boat Brokers is in the business of buying and selling boats of all kinds. They are located in Seattle on the waterfront and buy and sell boats all over North Western United States. Their web site lists all kinds of boats for sale and also has a blog where they share all kinds of boating news and information. They want to be seen as a thought leader in the world of boats and want to reach as many people as they can with their marketing efforts.

2 The Tools you need At the very least to get started, you need to have a Twitter account and a Facebook account. Even if you already have personal accounts, you may want to consider creating new more focused accounts. For our Best Boat Brokers company we re going to create a new Twitter account. Here s how to do that. Twitter Visit and sign up for a new account. We searched for the and it was available so we took it. For your needs, try and get an account user name that is as specific as you can be to what you are doing. Choose wisely. The next step when setting up your new twitter account is to find other accounts to follow. Since were in the boat business, we enter boats in the search field and follow boat companies and other boat related acounts.

3 Once you have followed enough people and companies, upload your company logo or image and write a descriptive bio and click done. You can further edit your profile and customize it with a nice header, your location and your website. You can also change the design of your profile so feel free to play around with this until you have a color scheme and design that suits your brand and your business. Your basic Twitter account is now setup and ready to go. Facebook Page To get Facebook setup, you will need a personal account which I would assume you probably already have. Once you have a personal account, you will need to create a Facebook page.

4 To create a new Facebook page, scroll to the bottom of the Facebook web site and you will find a link to Create a Page. Click on it and you should see this. Select the section that best describes your business or niche. For our Best Boat Brokers, we are going to use the Local Business or Place type page. Follow the steps to complete the setup. You should now have a page that looks something like this. You can fill in as much additional information as you like to make the page more complete and nice looking. Add a cover image and other relevant content to make it more appealing to your target market. Try and keep a similar design on all of your social networks and on your website.

5 With your Facebook page setup, were going to setup Twitter to post your tweets directly onto your Facebook page. This is a very easy task to setup. Login to your Twitter account and go to your profile page. A the bottom you will see a Connect to Facebook button. Click on this and follow the steps to allow Twitter to post to your Facebook page on your behalf. Make sure that you select your page and not your personal profile. Now that we have setup your Twitter and Facebook accounts and have setup the link between them, we re going to introduce you to a very powerful automation tool that will put the internet to work for you. The tool is called IFTTT. IFTTT If This, Then, That What is IFTTT? IFTTT is a service that lets you create powerful connections on the internet with one simple statement that is referred to as a Recipe: The basic building blocks to a recipe are Channels. Each Channel has its own Triggers and Actions that can perform specific tasks for you. There are many Channels that can be used including the two we just created, your Twitter and Facebook page. Some other examples of Channels are:

6 The combinations are plenty and there are many to explore but first we need to explain how this all works together. Triggers The this part of a Recipe is a Trigger. Some example Triggers are I m tagged in a photo on Facebook or I check in on Foursquare. Others triggers can be when a favorite blog you like posts new content or when someone tweets something with a specific hastag. Each Channel has its own set of triggers. Actions The that part of a Recipe is an Action. Some example Actions are send me a text message, create a status message on Facebook, post this to my WordPress blog or Tweet this. Angain, each Channel also has it s own set of actions. Ingredients Ingredients are pieces of data from a Trigger. For example, the Ingredients of an Trigger could be: subject, body, attachment, received date, and the sender s address. The ingredients for a WordPres post could be: Post title, Post content and post author. There are many options available to suite your needs. As you learn more, you will see how this all fits together. Now that you have a bit better understanding of what IFTTT is and what it can do, let get started and setup an account. Navigate your web browser over to and click on the join link.

7 Fill out all the fields and create your account. Now that we have a Twitter account, a Facebook account and an IFTTT account we are close to putting in place our first piece of automation. Before we do that we need to decide what we are going to setup to auto-tweet about. Finding Relevant Content Auto-tweeting is useless without a good source or sources of content to tweet about. This may seem challenging on first glance but it s not. The internet is full of useful content on every possible subject and there is lots of it being created daily by thousands of people. Blogs and RSS feeds For our first auto-tweeting task, we are going to leverage a technology called RSS. Almost every blog on the internet has what is called an RSS feed. RSS is an XML based feed of the blog posts. To illustrate this, go to and you should see the following page. The icon that the big red arrow is pointing at os the link to the RSS feed. Click on it and you will be taken to a page that either is the RSS XML feed or a page that lists a bunch of

8 specific RSS feeds. In the case of Boating World, they have a list of about 8 different feeds for specific subjects. For our first automation, we are going to use Boating Worlds News Article feed for our recipe Trigger. The feed link looks like this: and the feed page itself looks like this. Like I mentioned above, almost every blog on the internet has an RSS feed and you can used these feeds for fresh relevant content for auto-tweeting. To find more content sources try Googling: Boating Blog RSS IFTTT Auto-Tweeting Recipe Login to your IFTTT.com account and click on the browse link at the top. From here, you can see all of the many recipes you can use to automate all sorts of interaction between Channels. For our first recipe, we are going to use an RSS to Twitter recipe. In the search box, type RSS to Twitter and you should get back the following recipe. Once you click on it, you will have to activate your Twitter Channel. Click on the activate button and you will be asked to login to your twitter account and authorize IFTTT to tweet on your behalf. Once that is done, enter the Boating World RSS feed in the News Feed Item field. This is your trigger.

9 When Boating World publishes a new post, IFTTT will perform the Twitter action we define below which is post a tweet. You can add all sorts of feed Ingredients from the dropdown menu on the right but I recommend you use the Entry Title, EntryURL and add one or two relevant hashtags. In the case of this feed, we are going to use #boats and #boating so that people on Twitter that follow these hashtags will find these tweets. Once you re done, click on the Use recipe and your first piece of auto-tweeting functionality is set. Your new found automation is now setup but it s won t start to work until Boating World posts a new piece of information and IFTTT triggers this newly created recipe. Now you may be thinking, how many times does boating world post new content? They may post once daily or they may only post once a week. The key to automating your twitter account is to add more of these recipes with as many relevant RSS feeds as you can. As an example, one of our Twitter accounts uses the RSS to Twitter recipe with over 100 blogs RSS feeds. This provides enough unique content to tweet all day long, day after day.

10 Other Automation Recipes to explore

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