FreshNetworks Blog

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An essential part of social media management is blogger outreach. Here are our social media management team’s top tips to ensure you reach  your target market effectively:

1. Be relevant

It might sound obvious but make sure that the bloggers you contact are actually relevant for your message. Do your research.  If you’re not sure whether something will fit, it’s probably sensible to err on the side of caution and not bother (most bloggers will probably hate emails that start “I know you never write about X, but I’ve got this product…”).

And where do you find relevant bloggers? Google is the best place to start – advanced search features allow you sort to by date, time and location, helping you find the right people who are talking about the things that matter to you.

Also check out blogrolls from the sites you know are relevant – it’s always good to know what the bloggers you’re reaching out to  are reading.

Another big recommendation from the team here at FreshNetworks is PeopleBrowsr, which can help you find bloggers by filtering via location, influence & communities to zero in on who is worth reaching out to.

2. Get to know your bloggers and build relationships

Follow your bloggers on Twitter – whether from your brand’s or company’s account or your own – and talk to them. If you’ve got something interesting to say, they’ll  listen.

Take every opportunity you can to make connections offline – such as industry events and conferences – or even think about hosting a blogger event of your own.

3. Get your message right

Don’t just send a blogger a press release and hope for the best. Tailor your message and demonstrate that you know why you’re writing to them. Which piece(s) of content on their blog were interesting or prompted you to write to them?

Write to the blogger like they’re a human being but don’t be too over-familiar. Use an open and friendly tone of voice and unless you really think it suits, don’t be too formal . Get to the point!

4. Make it easy for the blogger

You want the blogger to write something for you, so don’t make their life difficult. Attach images that they’d otherwise have to take from your website, give them accurate information, include links and make the information you’re presenting straightforward.

5. To pay or not to pay and other incentives

We’d never pay for  blog coverage and we’d never recommend a client to. Firstly, your chances of being re-blogged by others is diminished if they see that a post talking about your brand is sponsored. Secondly, bloggers’ opinions count. Surely it’s better to get coverage because they think your brand or product is cool or your message is interesting rather than having paid for it?

Of course, products for review are a different matter and a nice freebie or two can definitely keep a good blogger relationship thriving!

6. Say thanks/ show you care

Finally, say thank you. And mean it.  A quick email, a re-tweet, a link posted on Twitter – simple things to show your gratitude, show-off the coverage to your audience and (hopefully) reward the blogger with some lovely traffic back!



There are a lot of community platforms on the market today and we thought it would be useful to collate a complete list of them.

Please let us know if there are any tools missing from the list – think of this as a kind of “wiki” which we will add to over time. We hope it will eventually become a useful community platform tool resource.

• Drupal – Drupal open source content management system can be used for everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications. You can also build websites and use their “Pagebuild” option which enables non technical users to build their website quickly and easily.
• Get Satisfaction - a cost effective platform for SME business solutions.
• Jive – In addition to being a community platform, Jive ‘Engage’ offers collaboration software and social media monitoring.
• Joomla – Open source and one of the most widely used, with an extensive existing community. It enables you to build websites and powerful online applications.
• Kickapps – Everything built on the KickApps platform is powered from the same database of users and content, making it easy to create integrated experiences across your site, mobile app, Twitter, Facebook and more. That means you can update every single KickApps-powered experience from one place, keeping everything consistent and up to date, no matter how or where the audience accesses your content
• Liveworld – They specialise in Facebook Wall, Facebook Forums, Facebook interactive tabs. LiveWorld offers a series of applications and platforms designed to stimulate more conversation and engagement with customers. Comes in more than 60 country/language combinations.
• Lithium – available in 19 languages and dialects. It plugs customers into one powerful network by creating opportunities for them to engage in a community on your own site and connect to other social customers through Facebook and Twitter.
• Mzinga – Cloud based community platform enabling you to embed apps and create private/public communities.
• Ning – claims to be the world’s largest platform for community site building, offering an easily customised structure that can include a real time chat feature. It can also be integrated with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to create a digital hub.
• php-nuke - open source and despite being one of the older, more traditional platforms, it still has a rapidly increasing market-share.
• Pligg – offers an unlimited number of authors and the ability to add modular plugins to the platform according to your needs and desired social networks.
• Telligent – Evolution platform which allows for scalability and integration with existing software programmes.

Additions to the list since the post was made:

• EPiServer Relate – allows you to segment visitors based on location, interests or other profile data, meaning you can personalise each user’s experience to show them relevant articles, content or adverts.
• Social Engine – social network software that helps you build your own customized community websites.
• BuddyPress – Open source, out-of-the-box software to help build your own social network.
• IGLOO – SaaS-based enterprise social networking company. Managed solely in the cloud, IGLOO unites document management, web content management, collaboration and social features in one integrated suite.

On 13th July Facebook will be launching new Pages and Places functionality to enhance the existing parent-child Page structure.

Facebook will be adding mass management features to help businesses, in particular global brands, establish a more localized presence on Facebook, making it easier to manage multiple locations in a more scalable way.

The new features will appear automatically in all existing parent-child set ups, and the admin functionality will be available via the Pages API.

The 5 new changes to Facebook Pages and Places are as follows:

1. Locations tab

A new Locations tab will appear on the main parent Page. The Locations tab will automatically load nearby locations for a user, and it allows someone to search for locations by zip or postcode. The tab can be moved up or down, or removed altogether.

2. Parent-child linking

Facebook will add a link below the name of each child Place Page that links back to the main parent Page. This will help tie together multiple store locations to a main brand Page.

3. Check-in aggregation

All check-ins from child Places will be included in a parent Page’s overall check-in number.

4. Mass Places management

All parent Page admins will automatically have admin access to their child Places. The parent Page will appear as an admin on every child Place and only the parent Page will be able to remove themselves as an admin from a child Place.

5. New Pages API features

You will be able to edit multiple Places at once using new features in the API, including ‘wall settings’ (you will be able to set a default landing tab, set up an open or closed wall, allow fans to post photos, etc.), ‘custom tabs’ (you will be able to add or remove these), and ‘Check-in Deals’ (you can create/edit Check-in Deals for individual locations). You will still be able to use the Page publishing feature in the API to localize your posts at scale.

It will be interesting to see if this influences how Global brands use Facebook moving forward. Is it better to have seperate pages for each location or just have one main page. What are your thoughts on this?

Online community moderation company Community 102 recently published an interesting infographic which looked at how different age groups interact online across the social web.

Key takeaways include:

• When it comes to age distribution across the social web, the most active age range is 35-44 year olds (25%) in comparison to just 9% of 18-24 year olds.
• The highest majority of Facebook users are aged between 18-25 (29%) while on Twitter the highest majority of users are 26-34 year olds  (30%).
• The average LinkedIn user is 44 years old.
• The average Twitter user is 39 years old.
• The average Facebook user is 38 years old.
• 26% of Millenials (people born between 1978 and 1994, so aged 16-32, and the first generation to be “raised” on the internet) access social networks at least once a day. Millenials also spend an average of 23 minutes online every day.

How different age groups interact across the social web

Keeping track of discussions surrounding your brand or competitors is crucial for successful social media monitoring and listening. One challenge is the sheer range and volume of conversations that take place online, and determining what to do with them.

Sentiment analysis is a difficult task to automate as irony and sarcasm can generate false results, affecting accuracy. Being able to identify what action a posting needs, if any, is also difficult, as spam or bot messages might drown out genuine users.

We spoke to Simon Campbell about the exciting approach SoDash has taken to social media monitoring. SoDash uses artificial intelligence which means the tool can be “trained” into determining the sentiment and category of a social media posting. This advanced approach to social media monitoring can potentially result in greater effectiveness at gathering intelligence from online conversations, and reacting to them appropriately.

What do you feel is the most accurate definition of a social media management tool?
I think the key is how you define “management”. There are a lot of social media monitoring and reporting tools, but I think the real value comes from engagement, which is something the traditional offerings in the market do quite poorly. I think the most accurate definition for the perfect social media management tool would be: A tool that helps you “monitor”, “filter”, “engage with” and “report on” social media in the most efficient way by automatically identifying opportunities and reducing workload through improved workflow.

Why do you think they are valuable to brands or businesses (ie, time savers etc)?

Tools by definition are there to make life easier and the good ones will cleverly filter all of the noise out there in social media, deliver just the relevant messages and provide a much improved work flow so that social media can be managed with minimal resource and maximum efficiency. Businesses need to be able to simply monitor and engage with their customers and prospects within social media as this represents how their brand is viewed and can relate directly to the bottom line.

What do you think is the most accurate way of tracking social media activity without using a tool?

It is a fairly laborious task without using any tools at all as it involved creating individual searches in things like Twitter and manually monitoring them, and setting up Google Alerts for numerous phrases and again, manually checking them all in the different places. There are some free tools that go some of the way to help monitor (such as TweetDeck) but they still rely on someone sitting in front of it all the time and it does not do anything especially clever except for pulling in the information to one place.

Explain how SoDash works and why it is an effective tool for social media management.

SoDash is a social media dashboard for brands and organisations to monitor and interact with the market. The reason it is unique owes to its artificial intelligence algorithms that learn what is important to your business through tagging. Once trained, it will automatically tag messages that are sales leads, positive or negative comments about your brand or competitors, deliver market information, ghost write and send responses and much more. Whilst some tools out there are good for monitoring social media, SoDash enables you to take control of social media and make it work for you with minimal resources.

What platforms does SoDash cover?

SoDash currently covers Twitter and Facebook with full monitoring of blogs, forums, YouTube, LinkedIn and others coming in September. We can currently also link to any specific source if requested. It is important to understand about engagement in the different platforms. Twitter is by far the most engaging, as it is an open platform. Facebook is great if you have a page with lots of fans that you need to manage but you cannot access and engage with private profiles.

How are you different from other social media management tools on the market?

SoDash is unique because it has in-built artificial intelligence which enables it to be trained to filter, recognise and tag messages based upon the criteria that is important to your business. Due to the artificial intelligence algorithms, it is also much more accurate when looking at things like sentiment analysis as again it is trained in relation to all aspects of the messages, including the structure, punctuation and person messaging, not just positive or negative words as with other tools. Essentially, other tools on the market have been developed to focus on monitoring whereas SoDash is built for engagement with monitoring as a given.

Who do you see as your main competitors?

Companies that use SoDash might also look at Radian6 or CoTweet. Both were built initially with monitoring and reporting in mind and, as with other tools on the market, they do not incorporate artificial intelligence so are reliant on manual filtering and responses. We have come across agencies who might continue to use something like Radian6 alongside SoDash although SoDash will soon be able to offer the full breadth of monitoring and reporting to cover all angles. Another of the features that customers are highlighting as a strong aspect of SoDash in comparison to other tools is the ease of use.

What sort of future developments can we expect to see from SoDash?

With the core functionality in place, the SoDash roadmap now focuses upon bringing on more channels/platforms and the automation of more specific reporting, especially to cover internal factors such as response times to messages (all of which can be provided now if requested). There are also some really cool advances that no one else has on the radar right now, but you will have to wait to see those!