Socialyzer

A blog about Social Marketing, Business & Entrepreneurship.

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3 Books That Have Shaped Me As An Entrepreneur

There are a lot of books out there about business, life, etc. Few that I've read have made a significant and lasting impact on me. These are those few.

1. Just Listen by Dr. Mark Goulston

This book is extremely powerful.

Whether you're the leader of your startup or just someone who's trying to do a better job connecting with people, this book will show you how to reach anyone.

It has certainly helped me as I grow into becoming a CEO. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn how to better communicate with the people they interact with in their life.

2. Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People by Richard G. Shale

As the leader of a startup, you're going to be doing a lot of negotiating. Co-founder equity, investment, employees, business deals. It's non-stop. 

Negotiating has probably been one of my biggest fears to overcome as a startup founder.

I'm learning quickly, but certainly have a long way to go. This book has taken my understanding of the art of negotiating to an entirely new level.

3. Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson

If you've founded a startup you've thought about taking outside investment, even if it was to decide you didn't want it.

The reality is the venture capital world can be intimidating, confusing and potentially shady. This book sets the record straight and comes from some of the most respected people in the industry.

After reading this book, you will know and understand the ins and outs of venture capital in great detail. Even though we haven't yet raised VC for Socialyzer, I'm glad to have this knowledge on my side.

What about you? Leave a comment with your favorite books as an entrepreneur!

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Announcing New Pricing!

We recently reached out to a lot of you and we got some really great feedback on our subscription plans and pricing. First, thanks to all of those who took the time to share their thoughts. Second, we're extremely happy to announce new pricing plans based on your feedback! Without further ado, here are the new plans: The Personal Plan - $5/month - subscribe now

Connect, optimize and publish to 1 social account per network

See all your stats for the posts you publish

Data trends and insights

Unlimited posts in your SmartQueue

The Business Plan - $19/month - subscribe now

Connect, optimize and publish to unlimited social accounts

Facebook Pages support

See all your stats for the posts you publish

Data trends and insights

Unlimited posts in your SmartQueue

What if I'm already a subscriber? - THANK YOU! We really appreciate your support. If you're already a subscriber we've upgraded you to the Business Plan level of functionality at the same price you've been paying. I let my free trial run out a long time ago, why should I care? - Glad you asked, Socialyzer is the only platform that analyzes your social audience and actually predicts when content should get posted to each network. Increase the clicks on the links you share by 250% or more! We're really excited for these changes and the new features (photos anyone?) we have coming soon.  As always, don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected]. Rocco and I will be around for a few hours to answer any questions you might have. Cheers, Bradley Founder

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Sending Your Tweets to Facebook? Read This First!

One time-saving practice in social marketing is to send the same content out to multiple social networks.

While this might make your life easy as someone who's managing multiple social accounts, it could be costing you fan/follower engagement!

Even on our own platform we try to make it easy for our customers to get their message out there. After you've connected up multiple social networks, you can choose to send the same content across all networks.

As we all know, Tweets are limited to 140 characters (117 if you have a link!) so it's hard to say a lot. Facebook updates however, have much more generous limits on the amount of text you send.

So, we decided to investigate what happens when someone has selected to send the same update to both Twitter and Facebook, but then has also customized the text slightly for Facebook.

For this adventure, we took a sample of about 1300 recent posts that were published to both Twitter and Facebook.

Of those 1300 posts, about 500 of them had text that was customized for Facebook.

The results were actually pretty enlightening.

If you customize your text to Facebook, you receive 30% more clicks on your links on average!

The beauty of Socialyzer is that you don't have to trade results for convenience.

Register for a free, no credit card required 15-day trial at https://socialyzerhq.com Try Socialyzer for Free

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Customize Your Optimization Window for Increased Results

One of the most powerful features of the Socialyzer platform is the ability to customize your optimization (or publishing) window.

This allows you to have full control of the time period in which the post should be published, but still get the maximum benefit of Socialyzer optimization available within that window.

The optimization window can be customized for each individual post that you publish. You can also change the default optimization window (24 hours) in your profile settings.

The format for the optimization window is essentially "within the next X hours from now."

So, if you set an optimization window of 72 hours, Socialyzer will analyze every time slot from the moment you click the Smart Queue button, to 72 hours in the future.

Give it a try and see what your results look like! What do you use as your default and how often do you customize it?

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How to use the Socialyzer Bookmarklet

The Socialyzer Bookmarklet is a super convenient way to push content into your queue as you're browsing the web.

First, log into your Socialyzer account http://socialyzerhq.com/login

Once you're on your Dashboard, locate the "Socialyzer Bookmarklet" button above your Accounts list.

Drag this button to your web browser's bookmarks bar.

Now, when you're on a webpage that you 

want to share via Socialyzer, just click the bookmarklet from your bookmarks bar, and the Socialyzer compose window will pop up.

The content is pre-populated with the title of the webpage and the shortened URL is automatically included.

Feel free to change/customize the content if you wish, but leave the URL if you want us to track clicks!

Select your optimization window as usual, then the social accounts you want to publish to, and hit Smart Queue!

That content is now scheduled to go out at the optimal time for each account. #BOOM!

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Say Hello to Facebook Pages

We know, it's been a LONG time coming, but support for Facebook pages is finally here!

You can now connect unlimited Facebook pages to your Socialyzer account... here's how.

Step 2: Click the + sign on the Accounts menu navigation.

Step 3: Click the Sign in with Facebook button

Step 4: After logging into Facebook, you'll be redirected back to Socialyzer. If there are pages to add, you will see a modal window giving you the option to connect pages. Select the pages you would like to connect to Socialyzer and click "Add Pages".

That's it!

With your pages connected, they will now show up in the compose window as well as the Account filter menu.

As always, we schedule posts to each account individually for maximum engagement!

We hope you enjoy this new feature and don't hesitate to send your feedback to us at [email protected]!

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New Socialyzer Feature: Connect Multiple Social Accounts

With our recent update, we've added one of the most requested features we've had to our service; multiple-social accounts.

Previously, you've only been able to connect a single Twitter account, LinkedIn account, and Facebook account. Now there are no limits!

You can connect additional accounts from the Dashboard by clicking the plus icon in the left menu bar. 

Click the "Profile" link in the main top navigation and then choose a network to add another social account.

As you know Socialyzer is special because of what happens behind the scenes. Our complex optimization algorithms give each and every post you publish a much higher probability of engaging your audience.

We're excited to add multiple accounts and enable even more efficient social media management capabilities within our platform.

As always, please send us your feedback at support [at] socialyzerhq [dot] com or tweet us at @SocialyzerHQ

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Important Maintenance Announcement!

Hey Socialyzers,

Beginning this evening, Thursday September 12th at 11pm CDT, we will start a major system upgrade on Socialyzer. We expect the upgrade to be complete by 1am CDT. This update brings a number of new features and capabilities to our platform and sets the stage for a lot of great stuff in the near future. However, it does also mean that our service will be unavailable during the maintenance window. Any items currently in your queue and scheduled to be published during the downtime will be moved to either before or after the maintenance window (whichever is closest) automatically. No action is required on your part.

We really appreciate your patience and we're excited to get this update into your hands!  

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter at @SocialyzerHQ or shoot us an email to [email protected]

Sincerely, Bradley Joyce CEO

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Are Predictive Analytics Overrated? Not in Social Media!

I recently read this great article titled, Are Predictive Analytics Overrated?

It's an interesting question. Predictive Analytics is the darling of the business intelligence world right now and is rapidly being applied to new areas.

While the field of predictive analytics has been around for quite some time, it's only just now really being harnessed to its full potential.

Gary Jackson, Director of Business Analytics at CSC, touches on it is his talk that's linked in the article:

Jackson brought up an interesting note on categorizing unstructured social media such as Facebook and Twitter status updates. “It’s not about social media,” he says, “it’s about you as a human being. When you update Facebook or Twitter, you’re doing two things: you’re putting up life events that are either lifestage or lifestyle events.”

 Examples of lifestage events include getting married, having a child, going to college whereas lifestyle events include skiing, going to a concert, watching a television show according to Jackson. Getting a grasp on these events and how they shape a person may help a company make decisions on how to market to individuals and put together packages that cater to certain lifestyles and lifestages.

For marketers, it's always been important to try to appeal to the emotional side of customers, but it's been difficult to know just what strings to pull.

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook now provide windows directly to this data.

Couple these psychographic data points with the predictive analytics and you now have an incredibly powerful marketing platform.

The future is really exciting!

Want to see what the power of predictive analytics can do for your social media engagement? Try Socialyzer for free today! 

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Why Social Media Best Practices Are Your Worst Enemy

You’ve seen the reports. You’ve seen the blog posts about best practices and timing your tweets. You’ve tried it.

And while you may have seen some incremental lift in performance, the results were nowhere near what you could have achieved.

Our research proves it.

We’ve heard this story repeated a thousand times as marketers attempt to optimize their social media activity for maximum ROI.

The truth is, social media best practices are about as useful as a pocket knife when you’re trying to cut down a tree. Sure, it helps you make a bit of progress, but you really need something specifically designed for your specific situation, ie, your audience/community.

The reality is that everyone’s social audience is unique and the environment on a social network is changing constantly. What works today, may not work tomorrow. And what works in general, certainly doesn’t mean it’s best for you.

At Socialyzer, we do an in depth analysis on the audience of each user. We analyze their profile, their tweets, their followers’ profiles and their followers’ tweets and activity.

We recently did this analysis for Distribion(@DistribionDM), a distributed marketing company and Rhymesayers.com (@rhymesayers), an independent hip-hop label.

The “best practices” would have them tweeting at 12pm and 6PM Eastern time to maximize clicks.

Our personalized analysis showed that, in fact, @DistribionDM should tweet at 10am Eastern time for maximum clicks and @rhymesayers at 3pm Eastern time. The difference between our recommendations and “best practices” is an eternity on Twitter!

The only thing that the best practices get right for these two accounts was that they should share midweek. The top 5 best time slots for each fell during Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Where best practices ultimately fail is that they don’t take into account the variables of your specific audience.

One of the clearest indicators of the difference between various accounts is measuring when an account’s audience is online and most likely to engage. Compare the two charts below.

  The charts clearly display a significantly different audience activity profile, something that can’t be uncovered without an account-specific analysis.

The results? After implementing the Socialyzer recommendations, @DistribionDM saw a 130% increase in average clicks per tweet and a 200% increase in average retweets.

Now that Twitter has become accepted as a powerful tool for reaching customers and prospects, marketers must move past tribal knowledge and start rigorously using data and analysis to drive engagement results. If you are using best practices you are doing a disservice to both your followers and your organization.

Stay tuned for our follow up post on what happens when you further optimize for a specific segment of your social audience that you want to reach, the results are even more surprising!

Want to have this type of complex analysis happen *every* time you want to share content to a social network... and automatically schedule it for the perfect time for maximum impact? Try Socialyzer for free today!

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Do More With What You Got

Following up on my previous post about scheduling, I wanted to talk about some interesting numbers I came across today.

According to a survey conducted by Awareness Inc, most social media marketers/teams have relatively limited resources. They found that:

Only 8% of respondents reported a social marketing budget above $50,000. 

74% of respondents reported only one to three workers dedicated to social media

only 12% of respondents reported a dedicated staff of five or more.

These numbers really show why integrating a tool such as Socialyzer into your social media workflow can bring big returns.

We analyze massive amounts of data in order to predict when and where your content will perform best. We can optimize for clicks, or we can optimize for increased sharing (yes, they are different!).

This allows you to focus on generating more valuable content and engaging with your audience rather than doing data analysis to optimize your efforts... all with the click of a button!

In short, Socialyzer allows you to get significantly more out of what you're already doing and the resources you have available.

Why not try it for free? http://socialyzerhq.com

*image courtesy of creature_comforts*

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Scheduling Tweets Isn't Free Pass to Opt Out of Engament

I had a short Twitter conversation today about scheduling and it went like this:

Here at Socialyzer, our goal is to help people get more out of their social media efforts and scheduling is a huge part of that.

We've been able to determine that there IS in fact a better time to send out most of your tweets if you want more engagement happening around that content. In fact, the Socialyzer SmartShare optimization engine currently increases clicks on links in tweets by 91% and this is entirely achieved by sending out the tweet at what the algorithm determines to be the best time!

So it's really frustrating to me that scheduling gets a bad rap because people are abusing it like it crazy.

As Tim points out, this IS the real-time web we're talking about. People using Twitter, especially biz/brands and anyone who has an economic incentive behind social media us, CANNOT forget that being actively engaged with your audience is a HUGE piece of the puzzle.

Our stance is that you SHOULD schedule your content (that is not time-sensitive, or in reply to a real-time conversation... ie, your general marketing messaging as an example) and then you SHOULD ALSO be online and actively engaging with your audience whenever that content is published and people are interacting with it.

And again, I'm talking about people who have an economic driver behind their social media activity. Joe Average Twitter user definitely has no business scheduling tweets, with one particular exception.

It's a personal pet peeve of mine when someone on Twitter is reading their favorite blogs, news sites, etc and has to tweet out every since article in a short time span. This is the definition of spam! In a case like this, using a scheduler, like Socialyzer, can alleviate the spam and distribute out these articles over a longer period of time.

In conclusion, scheduling your content smartly can give you a HUGE boost in social media engagement.

If you want to see for yourself, Socialyzer can help you do this with a click of a button. Try it free at SocialyzerHQ.com.

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Help Socialyzer Pitch at the Founder Showcase

We’ve applied to pitch at the 8th Founder Showcase competition out in San Francisco in November and now we need your help.

A large portion of who gets selected to pitch will be based on public voting that’s happening now through October 16th.

Help us out by visiting http://foundershowcase.strutta.com/entry/198166 and throwing us a vote, then share it out to your network of friends!

THANK YOU!

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Queued.at is now Socialyzer! Check it out at http://socialyzerhq.com

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New Queued.at Feature: Per-post Optimization Window

We just launched a handy new feature on Queued.at!

You now have the ability to set the optimization window on a per post basis. Previously, this was a user level setting. That setting is still the default value, but you can further customize it per post when using the bookmarklet or main website.

What is the optimization window? Glad you asked!

The optimization window is a setting that tells the SmartShare optimization engine the period of time to analyze in order to predict the best time slot for you posts.

If you set it to 24 hours, the SmartShare engine will analyze each hour over the next 24 hour period, and select the best time slot to publish your post. If your setting is 72 hours, the SmartShare engine analyzes from the moment you click the Queued button up to 72 hours later.

This is a really important variable. Sometimes, you want to pick the absolute best time over the next couple days. Other times, however, you want to send something out sooner, but still optimize when it gets published.

With the new post-specific optimization window, you can now customize your timeframes to your hearts content!

Check it out at http://queued.at - as always, the service is free!

Enjoy!

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I got 99 problems but ENGAGEMENT ain't 1!

One of the coolest things to see when building something is to see it *work*.

Imagine Jay-Z writing this song I'm channeling in the title; he thinks of some lyrics, has an idea of a beat, lays the lyrics to a track, releases the track, and sits back and watches how the product fares in the market.  That album sold over 3 million copies, by the way.  That had to feel so good to Mr. Carter, I'm sure.

Same thing in the technology industry.  You think about an idea, you dream about the idea, you work on the idea, you launch the idea, and then you wait.

The best part is when the idea, now a reality, begins to actually work and show successful results.

And now for the smooth transition...the first version of our SmartShare API is showing some awesome results.  See, it all started when we dreamed of a smart technology that would help us drive more engagement on the things we shared across social networks everyday.  We worked on a beta product that utilized our SmartShare API (can be seen here called Queued.at) and launched it into the public.  Then we waited.....

And lo and behold, people who use the technology get over 122% more engagement (clicks per post) on their sharing!!  Doing the same simple action of hitting a "Share" button resulted in a HUGE difference in engagement...Sa-Weet!

Here's to you Hova: after using Queued.At powered by SmartShare technology.....I'VE GOT 99 PROBLEMS but ENGAGEMENT AIN'T 1!!!

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Scheduling tweets & posts make you MORE social

Recently, Amanda from Spiderworking.com wrote an excellent article on scheduling posts to social networks (see it here).  What is scheduling you say? 

Basically, scheduling a post is when, instead of immediately sharing something on social networks, you queue the post or content for a later time and date in the future.

There are a myriad of reasons why someone or some company would choose to schedule something versus immediately sharing something with their audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc. Again, Amanda talks about them in her post.

Here at 3#Labs, we believe one of the biggest reasons for scheduling is pure mathematics.  There's a science behind scheduling - that is, there truly is an optimal time and day and network for each particular message to allow for the most engagement, and so often that time and day isn't right when you finish typing your status update, blog, or tweet.  It actually is sometime in the future.

We've set out to prove the math and science behind sharing.  We are building a predictive engine that can, with a click of a button, set the stage for maximum engagement with the content and message you are sharing with your audience(s) on social networks.

"But, that's synthetic and inherently anti-social!", one might say.  Well, Amanda puts it perfectly in her post, and I'll leave you with her quote:

"Scheduling doesn't preclude interaction, it just guarantees you are able to reach your audience when they are online even if you are not. Those who schedule must respond and interact live also, but if you schedule you can do this when it suits you without loosing your audience.  In this respect scheduling tweets actually makes you more social, not less so."

We wholeheartedly agree Amanda.  Now, what are your thoughts?