Buying fans or followers has somehow become a sort of a taboo whenever PR or marketing experts discuss social media strategy. It is something people regard with distrust and the act of paying someone to like your page or follow you on Twitter is something devious and wrong. As always, things are not black and white, most of the online world has an intriguing grey attitude.

Let’s face it, if you advertise your page or profile on Facebook, Twitter, Google Ads or wherever, you still pay for people to like you. When you buy social media fans, does that mean they are worse then when you pay for advertising? Maybe. It all depends on what service you’re using for your purchase, it depends on their method of getting you fans and so on.  Continue reading

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Guest blogging is one of the best ways to get a blog or website known and target new audiences, we all agree with that. Welcoming guest posters is also a great way to provide fresh content to your readers and target the crowds the invited author already appealed to. By analyzing these two sides of the guest blogging scene, you can easily tell this is a win-win promotion practice.

No wonder it has spread throughout the blogosphere and it has created a need for the proper tools! A while back I wrote about the launch of My Blog Guest, a place where guest posters and blog owners could meet, connect and see how they could help each other out. It looked promising and I decided to try out Ann Smarty’s project and see for myself how it worked. Continue reading

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Passion for food is something a lot of people share, regardless of gender, location or cultural background. We all need to occasionally indulge our taste buds and linger in the flavors of a delightful meal, alone or in the company of others. Following that passion to get people to write and share their thoughts on food and what it means to be cooked well is bound to turn into a quite interesting social media project.

Chef and No Reservations TV show host Anthony Bourdain has had this wonderful idea of a crowdsourced library of essays on food and launched the Medium Raw Challenge. People are faced with an apparently simple, yet rather complex question – Foodies: What does it mean to cook food well?. They write their essays and post them on the challenge website and hope to win the Special Added Prize of $10,000 to the Grand Prize Winner and have their writing included in Bourdain’s latest book, Medium Raw. Continue reading

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While browsing through my LinkedIn account, I just noticed this question about apps that allow you to schedule tweets. Some of the answers stated no one should ever schedule tweets, as it is spammy. Automation is bad, don’t do it. And I started wondering. Is it really spam? Or is it just a way to make work easier and give your followers a break? And the answer is, like always, it depends

I should first say I manage a few Twitter accounts. On some I schedule tweets, on others I don’t. On those who are there to provide news on a certain topic, I do schedule tweets. I usually find the news all at once and just sending them all out at the same time is actually more spammy to some users than scheduling them throughout the day. That does not mean I ignore the conversation. I check the stream every couple of hours, check what others are saying, retweet, reply, thank people for their comments and retweets.

When it comes to blog posts, a lot of what I write is scheduled. And when I set the publishing time and date, I also set the tweet. Basically because I tend to get caught up and I might forget. I do check it, I do interact, as I said before. And I really don’t think programming tweets is a form of spam.

When all your tweets are programmed and you are never there to talk, reply or answer questions, it is definitely spam. You are there to broadcast more or less forcefully whatever you please and you really don’t care what your followers have to say. But from that to saying any form of automation and of rendering your work fast and effective is spam is a long road to be traveled.

What about you? Do you schedule tweets? Do you think it’s spam when others do it? Should we ban all automation, good or bad from social media? I say not, yet it all needs to be approached with great care. And over to you…

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Yesterday was the last day when contestants could submit entries to the WoBM Anniversary Group Writing Project Blogging and Relationships – Write about the wonderful people you’ve met. Here’s the complete list of submitted entries. The jury will now go behind close doors and deliberate! Not really, but we’ll be back with the three lucky winners as soon as possible!

Brad Shorr – Blogging Relationships are Gold for the Soul

Sarah Welstead – 7 Rules for Effective Relationship Blogging

Andrew of Good Honest Dollar – Three Special Bloggers

Joanna Young – Why it’s worth sticking with Twitter

CV Harquail – Tweet yourself like the person you want to be

Jacquelyn – How I started the WParent blog

Lillie Ammann – Blogging Friends

Nithya – Building Strength through Support

And my own – Investing in relationships has excellent ROI

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