Check out  this info-graphic for the biggest parties around the globe being planned on Social Media.

Lionel Rainey III – 3Lions Media

To start using the Facebook timeline instantly, simply follow these 5 simple steps:

1. From the Facebook web site, use the Facebook Search Feature to find the Developer Facebook App. Simply type the word  “Developer” in the FB search bar, the app should list at or near the top of your search results page. ow click “Allow” to become an official Facebook Developer.Congratulations! You are now a FB Developer.

2. Within the Developer app at or near the top right corner of the app, click the “+ Create New App” button. Now simply fill out your desired Facebook app’s “display name” and “description,” be inventive or type gibberish, it’s up to you as this data is useless and only visible to you.

3. Agree to the Developer privacy agreement. TechCrunch requires developers to have a “verified account” to prevent misuse and proof of age. Agree to the terms accordingly .

4. In the left sidebar, using the “Open Graph” feature, type in a test phrase your new app. I created a “Fly my Airplane” app, so my test verb will be “Fly” and my test noun will obviously be, “Plane.”

5. Go through a bunch of web pages featuring app news and developer information. Simply keep on saving changes to continue.

Within only a few minutes, maybe 5-10 minutes tops, you’ll see an “invitation” at the top of your Facebook profile. Give it s shot! Remember, it’s in Beta mode so don’t expect full, consistent service or access.

Want a QR Code? We can do that!

Is your business utilizing QR Codes? If not – you should.

Here are the stats:

Getting people to like your facebook fan-page and become engaged fans is no different than any other type of sales… you have to ask for the business. One way you can do this is with QR codes that lead to your fan page.

Put them in your print advertising, on your business cards, at the point of sale…everywhere. Don’t be afraid to incentive them either. Give ‘em a reason to like you. Example: Like us on Facebook and be automatically entered to win _________.

Once someone becomes a fan, you can then engage with them whenever you want.

Like this idea? We have tons more.

Lionel Rainey III

3Lions Media

Social networking use has doubled since 2007, and it’s all thanks to Facebook, Twitter and an array of other social companies reaching record traffic highs.

comScore’s latest numbers are out, and they paint a familiar story: social networking is on the rise. It’s the rate of growth that’s surprising, though.

According to the web analytics firm, the average online user in the U.S. now spends nearly 16% of his or her time on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr or Twitter. That’s up from just 8% in July 2007. In the last year alone, social networking use has increased by approximately 25%.

The biggest reason for the increase in social networking is Facebook and its 700+ million users. In August 2005, Facebook was tiny compared to MySpace, its primary competitor. Facebook attracted less than 10 million monthly U.S. visitors, compared to MySpace’s 20+ million.

It wasn’t until May 2009 when Facebook finally caught up with its competitor, and ever since then Facebook has been on the rise, while MySpace has experienced a dramatic fall from grace. In May 2011, Facebook garnered 157.2 million visitors, more than four times the size of Myspace (34.9 million visitors). Facebook now reaches 73% of the U.S. Internet population each month, while MySpace has lost nearly 50% of its audience in the last year alone.

It’s not just Facebook that’s doing well, though: LinkedIn, Tumblr and Twitter all hit record highs in May, 2011. LinkedIn now attracts 33.4 million U.S. visitors, more than Twitter’s 27 million and Tumblr’s 10.7 million. Tumblr is the fastest-growing of the three companies though, boasting 166% growth in the last year. LinkedIn’s U.S. audience rose by a strong 58% in the last twelve months.

The spotlight is shining bright on these companies, thanks to a string of successful IPOs. LinkedIn shares soared during its public offering, while Pandora upped its share price twice due to heightened demand. The light is brightest for Facebook though, which could be one of the largest IPOs in history. comScore’s data contradicts recent reports that Facebook’s growth is slowing down.

Are you surprised by comScore’s numbers? Do you think social network’s growth is sustainable? Let us know in the comments.

Thank you to  Ben Parr  for this post.

By Timothy Boone Baton Rouge Business Report (Contact)

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Click the image to expand.

6 Essential Steps for Executing Your Social Media Strategy

It’s easy to plan a squeaky clean social media strategy for your business when it’s on paper. But executing all of the day-to-day tasks involved in that strategy can be a different story — and a giant, tangled mess — without implementing processes to manage it.

Thankfully, there are plenty of tools and strategies that can help community management teams communicate with each other, stay on the same page, schedule posts and cooperate with other departments.

Before you launch your strategy, consider how you will manage the execution. These six steps can help get you started.

1. Define Your Content Mission

Don’t start your social media process without thinking about what you’re trying to accomplish. Select your content accordingly.

International development organization Community Lab is striving to be a hub where supporters can learn about how they can make a difference. Therefore, its community engagement coordinator, Phi Pham, says he feels comfortable posting any content that has a relationship to some sort of cause or issue related to international development or international relations.

At local recommendation search engine Bizzy, however, the goal is to promote the brand and its full relaunch. Community manager Emily Hurley says she focuses on early adopters and tech-savvy consumers. On Facebook, however, the company tries to be accessible to a wider audience. The company includes announcements and tries to create brand awareness on both accounts, but is careful to not use the platforms merely as broadcast mechanisms.

“One unofficial guideline is to be real people online. No one likes to follow a corporate Twitter () bot,” Hurley says.

2. Explore Social Media Management Tools

There are a slew of quality tools that can help you manage your social media accounts, and many of them are free.

HootSuite (), one of the most popular tools for scheduling, posting and monitoring multiple accounts from one spot, recently surpassed 1 million users. Despite the popularity of this dashboard, Pham discourages social media managers from relying on it as their only management tool.

“The biggest mistake I have seen is that people get too lazy with their content posting,” he says. “They’ll want one main tool to post on all their social media accounts, and I don’t think there is one main tool to do that.”

Community Lab uses a variety of tools, including HootSuite, to maximize the capability of each network. For Facebook, Community Lab posts directly to the site and uses a spreadsheet in Dropbox () to schedule and aggregate content.

3. Keep Track of Who Is Posting

Having multiple people on your corporate accounts can create a situation ripe for double posts, mistimed announcements and general confusion about who is doing what when.

One solution is to have just one person post to all accounts. For Josh Pelz, the sole in-house social media person at Gansevoort Hotel Group, this is his only option. While it clears up any confusion, he says it can also be a bit overwhelming and takes up a lot of time that could be spent on bigger projects.

Another option is to divide the posting responsibility into shifts. Community Lab has one person who is responsible for posting during the weekdays and another person who is responsible on weekends.

Bizzy divides its local accounts among its community managers, making each person responsible for one account. Hurley oversees the main Twitter account and the Facebook Page. She says that this strategy is helpful in metering out content, so that multiple people don’t flood an account and that each person can maintain conversations. In some cases, however, she says that it might be more appropriate to use a “divide and conquer” strategy like Community Lab’s.

“The one caveat perhaps is that you make it a high priority to make sure conversations don’t get lost in the shuffle,” she says. “When one person is engaged with another user, that person owns that conversation as it continues.”

4. Be Cohesive

Even if multiple people post to your accounts, it’s important that what one person is posting doesn’t contradict or clash with what another person is posting. This has been especially important for Bizzy because it has multiple local accounts, as well as national accounts, that are run by different people.

Here’s how they stay on the same page, according to Hurley: “We have one main Twitter account that acts as a feed to our localized accounts, so we can maintain some control over when we release or link to certain things. Our local community managers use that stream to trigger announcements that they can then propagate across their own accounts. With that methodology, we can maintain some cohesiveness as a brand, but still allow our local folks to go make their localized accounts their own, with their own personality.”

5. Measure Success

Tools like Tap11 and HootSuite can help you compile social media analytics. But depending on how you define success, these numbers might not be the most important factor in your strategy.

“We ask ourselves questions like, ‘Are we learning from our users?’ ‘Do our users talk about us to their friends?’ ‘What are the positive things they say?’ ‘What are their most frequent concerns or questions?’” Hurley says.

This sort of information can only be gathered and measured through successful social media monitoring.

6. Report Your Results

Decide how often you will report on your social media activities and what you’ll include.

The report should include specifics — Pham compiles graphs of growth rates, summaries of the data, and explanations of why any data that stands out occurs during her weekly reports. But broader explanations of trends are also useful — Pelz says his reports take the form of a conversation with the rest of the marketing and PR department.

If you find yourself stuck, or simply don’t have the time or resources; Call a reputable Social Media Marketing or PR Firm. Make sure they define clear goals and lay out concise and realistic expectations.

Thank you to Sarah Kessler for this post.

Want a successful Social Media campaign? Stop selling!

It’s nothing new that people are growing more and more distrustful of advertisers and advertising messages. Long gone are the days that you can say you have the best product or service in a television ad or radio commercial and consumers just accept it.

Look at the car industry for example. Just because you tell me (in a fever pitch) that you have the best car at the best price, does not mean I’m going to run over and buy it. I want to know what other people who have bought from YOU and driven THAT car say about both.

The same goes for social media. It’s no different. Consumers don’t want to hear about your product of the day, or why they should buy this second from you. If they are looking for your product or service, they will find you. And when they do find you they don’t want to hear YOUR pitch… they want to hear YOUR customers pitching for you!

Encourage your clients or customers to post what they thought about the product and/or experience on your social media sites. Encourage conversation. Conversation: That’s a discussion between two or more parties. It’s not really a conversation if it’s just you pitching your wares.

If you’re trying to sell a product or service or whatever on Facebook or any other social media platform try this – Stop Selling – and watch what happens!

Lionel Rainey III

3Lions Media