You are a pretty engaged social citizen
You frequently tweet, post on your own blog, share videos on YouTube, upload photos to Flickr or Picasa, comment on other people blogs, update your various time lines, answer questions on Quora or Focus, publish your paperly or ScoopIt and are considered a real great asset in the social sphere.
But even your best friends don't know all your profile URLs by heart – let alone customers or prospects. Your "Presence Value" is highly diluted by the sheer size and diversity of the social web. As a result people have a hard time to find you despite all your engagement and have to search for your Twitter handle, your YouTube Channel, your Quora questions, your Flickr photos… .
XeeMe Social Presence Design
8 years experience and over 1,000 user requests
We built XeeMe based on 8 years learning about social dynamics and over 1,000 feature requests from our users who use XeeMe on a daily base.
1) Presence Completeness
In short: Add any conceivable network to your XeeMe
Make sure your XeeMe is the complete representation of all social sites that are accessible by anybody else. Don't do just the "most important" networks because you want to leave it up to your visitors to determine what is important to THEM – and that may be even different between visits. Don't forget to add your social bookmark sites – you put a lot of effort in. Don't forget the groups and communities that are meaningful to you. Don't forget your music, video or photo sharing sites, your CV pages and the many other presences. An average social media person has easily 20 -50 profiles. Some of the top guns may get even into the hundreds.
2) Site Selection & Analytics
In short: Select the proper network as we provide individual reporting for all supported sites
When you add your sites and networks make sure you use the available selection. XeeMe provides some powerful analytics helping you to identify the most relevant networks, or your incoming and outgoing social traffic and more. Each supported network has it's own processors inside XeeMe that help you analyze its value to you and your visitors. Also see "XeeMe Amplification Effect" below.
3) Leveraging the Amplification Effect
In short: The "XeeMe Amplification Effect" may increase your social traffic by a factor 5 or more
The amplification effect is a XeeMe phenomenon we just recently discovered ourselves. For every visit TO a XeeMe its owner experiences on average 5 visits FROM that XeeMe to its other sites. Some of the top networker even see an Amplification Factor above 10. In other words for every one visit TO your XeeMe you may get 5 or more visits FROM your XeeMe to your social networks and sites.
In contrast if you put your blog as a reference URL on a tweet or in a profile, your amplification factor is simply 1. For one visit you get at best one destination. If you add your LinkedIn profile to your Twitter account, the amplification factor is 1. For every one click on that URL you get one visit to your LinkedIn account – whether the visitor really want to go there or not.
If you add your XeeMe URL to your Twitter account for every click on that URL you may gain 5 or more visits to your various networks and sharing sites. In this case your amplification factor is 5 or you get 5 times the visits to your social presence.
4) Social Presence Tabs
In short: Put your main networks, groups and communities and other sites under the corresponding tab.
Based on user requirements we designed three tabs. Networks, Groups and Others. This is important because some visitors just want to see where you are, who you are and who your friends are. Others are keen in getting engaged in some of the groups or communities you are. But you also may have those other presences where you may not be as often or only interesting to people who already know you a bit better. Try to keep that structure to help others make sense out of your presence.
5) Share Your XeeMe
In short: Share your XeeMe daily wherever you are, with whatever you share
Newcomer to XeeMe often times complete their Xeeme and just let it sit. The real power of XeeMe comes only if you use it as your signature – your social footprint. There are three primary applications for your XeeMe
1) Your Social Sites
Add your XeeMe Link to ALL social networks and sharing sites you are on. Ideally make it your only link on those sites. Let your visitors see your entire social presence before they make a decision where they want to go.
2) Your Social Signature
Use your XeeMe as your social signature on every blog post, every comment you make and any other place where a user or reader may potentially know who you are.
3) Traditional Contact Info
Add it to your email signature instead of cluttering it or limiting it to only a few sites. Add it to Power Point presentations, business cards – and hey we've even seen bumper sticker :)
The more often you share your XeeMe the higher the traffic, the faster you grow your network and the more valuable your presence gets.
6) XeeMe and no other link
In short: Don't show any other social network links next to your XeeMe
Now – this may sound like we are ego egomaniacs – but here are some very good reasons:
If you make a list of your most important networks, lets say LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and add XeeMe for all the others – as often seen – you have a series of disadvantages:
1) Reporting
Every click and every visit from and to your XeeMe is captured for your reports – all the other visits are not.
2) Loss of Amplification Effect
Probably the most important reason is the loss of the "XeeMe Amplification Effect" (see above). The unique XeeMe Amplification Effect increases your social traffic by a factor of 5 or more. You loose that if you mix in other sites.
3) Presumption
You indicate what is important to you and what not – rather than letting your visitor decide what is important to THEM. The "Network Relevance Report" shows clearly that a large part of "secondary networks" are actually pretty interesting to your audience. But only if they know. So funnel your entire social traffic through XeeMe.
4) Opportunity Cost
Users would probably click on the known networks first and ignore the rest. This is just an assumption as we have no way of measuring it at this point. But you definitely loose an opportunity to introduce your visitor to your entire social presence
Alternatives to showing variety
The reason for putting other networks on a list is to indicate the variety. Therefore we developed a few options to indicate this too: One is to explain the XeeMe link with "My Entire Social Presence" indicating that thee is more – or using one of the multi-net buttons from XeeMe, some with the LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter logo on it. Or creating your own button.
7) Share to be shared
In short: Let your friends, colleagues and anybody in your network share your XeeMe with their networks
Share your XeeMe in a way it get shared by others. Share your XeeMe achievements like the Social Presence value so others may retweet it. Ask your friends to tweet your presence into their networks. Also we, from the XeeMe team, are more than happy to introduce your XeeMe to our own networks to give you great reach from the start. In order to get featured and make others feel good about sharing your presence make it really attractive.
8) Make your XeeMe attractive and intriguing
In short: Add more than 10 sites, use a theme, a custom background and make an intro on your What's up
What is attractive?
1) Obviously you want to have your photo a short bio on it.
2) Have your complete social presence on it. A rule of thumb: everything more than 10 sites becomes interesting. Below 10 basically indicates you are not very actively engaging. Sound more than you have? Well you are on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and have an account on Flickr or Picasa. You most likely have an account on Digg, Stumble or other social bookmarking sites. You probably belong to more than three groups or communities, maybe have an account on Klout or Foursquare? Maybe a URL shortener? That's 10 right there. If not you may want to explore them.
Why is it important? A larger variety makes your presence more intriguing and also increases your "Amplification Effect"
3) Select one of the available free themes to give your XeeMe some personal appeal.
4) You may want to upload a large photo as background to make it even more attractive
5) Try to grow your XeePV as quickly as possible above the 100 mark – ideally above the 500 mark. A XeePV of above 500 indicates that others find your social presence attractive as well – nothing is better in creating success than success :)
9) What's up & Bio
In short: Share what's on top of your mind – even selling is ok in this case and have a short bio.
XeeMe's "Whats Up" is most likely the most often read status line of all. Early users underestimate it's power. You share your XeeMe wherever you go and users who want to get in touch see this as their first status update from you.
Unlike the short life span of a tweet or most status lines, you may use your What's Up for a note to visitors with a longer life time – meaning no need to change it multiple times a day.
Share what's on top of your mind to create a maximum of openness. Now here is another key learning: When you share what you are trying to achieve, or even trying to sell – this is one of the very rare pieces of social real estate where it is actually OK. If you are trying to find customers buying your XYZ product, or buying your service or whatever – say so. If you want to get visitors to an event – share it here :)
While you have your bio on pretty much every social network make sure you have it on XeeMe too. It was a big requirement from one of our early users for a simple reason: It may be the most often used "first impression". Be consistent. You may simply use the same Bio you have on Twitter also for XeeMe and simply make XeeMe the one you cut and past to any new network as soon as you set it up.
10) Make sure your XeeMe Name is well chosen
Don't make yourself a SEO slave and also don't add current trends into your name. Rather make sure that your XeeMe name is short and is as close as possible to your name. You will want to set it up once and never change it again. You will want to make sure that the email you send tomorrow and get found in 10 years still point to your XeeMe even though it may look completely different, has completely different sites on and has evolved over the next 10 years.
A bad example would be JohnBrownLION6800 – in 10 years John may have more connections or the number of connections is no longer relevant. Also John may no longer be a Lion and so forth. JBrown would be a much better choice.
Another bad example is Tom-Ratherford-SEO-Expert. In 6 years Tom my no longer focus on SEO.
If you have to change your XeeMe name you will loose all the thousands of footprints in form of a link to your XeeMe. Emails with your signature will go nowhere.
Most made mistakes
1) You start and complete it later.
You may get quickly some hundred visits on your XeeMe. Try to complete it within a few hours.
2) Using XeeMe only for introductions
Keep in mind that even your very best friends don't know all your profile URLs by heart. Make it easy to "Everybody, All The Time" to get in touch or check one of your sites. And therefore always share it.
3) No sanity check on sites
Go once through the entire presence and check if all the links go where they supposed to go
4) Dismissal of the social traffic
You may soon have hundreds or thousands of visitors to your XeeMe. Make sure your know what the traffic is like and how to increase it. Watch your stats at least once a week but ideally once a day. Check the "Social Traffic Report" and learn what sites are of interest to your visitors. Set your social presence maintenance priorities accordingly. In other words: Whatever sites receive a pretty high traffic – maintain it well.
Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS
(My entire social presence)
