I need help with Social media!

My friends and I are actually setting up a small online magazine lately, and what makes me concern is how to use Social media to acquire more followers.

Our online mag is a small local one, very infant The Saigonese.

We are all students, so the budget is very limited, and the online sense of the mag makes us think Social media marketing must be the choice to promote us further. However, doing this is a lot harder than thinking about it.

We have Facebook fan page, Facebook group, twitter, YouTube, Flickr and of course the mag itself. We are now focusing more on Facebook since majority of our target customers is not twitter users. Even each of the admins for the Facebook fan page have actively promotes the page to their friends, the number of likes does not increase rapidly like what we imagine, given the credit of each of us and the vast number of our friends totally.

So, that alone alarms us! Despite the hard work we are putting in, this can fail badly!!! So, I use what I learn. And things turn a bit brighter!

First of all, do not invite all of your friends, it’s not likely they will respond to the invitations, people are naturally that ignorant. So, what I recommend is to choose from your friends list about 10 of the most influencers, send personal message to them, introduce the page, ask for their opinions. Also, send personal message to your besties, asking them to help spreading the page. The key is to address them as individuals, make them feel like involving and grab the attentions.

Apart from keep updating your page with relevant and interesting news updates and pictures, share them back to your personal home page. This is, in my opinion, more powerful than sending out invitation, sharing back the news to your page makes it appear on News feeds, and people can go to the page by clicking the post link. Being one of the admins doesn’t mean you need to agree with every post from other admins. You can generate conversations by speaking your opinion, referring back to the post on the fan page, get your friends involved.

I’m still figuring out what else to do, since this is a very small non-profit mag, the most irritating thing is the work contributed by volunteers is very unstable and unorganized. Nevertheless, we are seeing growth in the monthly visits, pageviews and likes, a positive sight!

Do you guys have any recommendation to promote my page? J give them to me please!

The Sims and Social media

True or not, the most developed and profitable areas in Facebook is not advertising, it is gaming. Zynga, and now EA, they are playing out their cards on the most popular social media page, Facebook.

EA game title The Sims Social has seen its monthly average users surpass that of Facebook giant Farmville on the social network. In total it now has an monthly average user base of 36m users. 

Only a few weeks into the Facebook games market, The Sims Social is already surpassing two of Zynga’s most popular and successful games on Facebook, Zynga Poker and Empires & Allies. That’s impressive considering The Sims Social is almost brand new. Yes, it does have its loyal followers who know the massive EA franchise, The Sims, but these numbers are still very fascinating to watch.

However, Zynga’s still looking good with behemoths such as CityVille but they are definitely starting to pay more attention with the numbers The Sims Social is putting out in such a short time frame.

What do you think? The Sims Social will last and out run CityVille totally? And if it does, does that create incentives for you to start buying and playing more of EA offline games? Let me know by leaving comments below.