Don’t Name Baby After Dad — You’re Damning His Online Reputation (And Yours!)

Naming the baby after the father used to be as common as meatloaf and green beans. It was a deeply rooted and well-respected tradition.

And listen, I understand the desire. You're passing on your genes, your values, and your legacy. How better to do that than to name the child after the father? Keep that patriarchal lineage going strong! You're already passing on your last name so why not the first name too? 

I'll tell you why.

Taking control of your online presence is challenging enough without having to compete with your own kid in the process. 

These days, your online presence is your business card, your resume, and your credentials all wrapped into one. Everyone Googles you now. Your clients, your employers -- even potential dates. What do you think clients do as soon as they get your name as a reference? You got it.

Heck, 80% of HR departments are required to check out your search results before offering an interview. And up to 70% of employers say they've chosen not to hire a person based on what they've found out about them online. If your results look bad, you're much more likely to get passed over for someone else. On the flip side, stellar search results can give you a huge edge in the competitive job market. Resumes tend to blend into one another but you can stand out if you look like an all-star online.

Image: Brandyourself.com

How do you take control of your search results? The short answer is that you need to distinguish yourself from anyone else of the same name and convince the search gods (i.e. Google) that you are the most worthwhile thing to show when users search your name online. (Here's the longer answer.)

This requires:

1. A lot of effort -- you need to build websites and social profiles and keep them consistently active with high quality, sharable content.
2. A little luck -- your work may be much harder or easier depending on the existing competition for your name.

Some folks have the sad misfortune of being named something extraordinarily common. These guys and gals must fight for the rest of their adult lives, scratching and clawing their way onto the first few pages of search results. I empathize with the John Smiths of the world. 

Other people are born with the same name as someone famous. This is perhaps even worse. To stand out online, these people must do all they can to overcome that famous person's search results. Imagine the frustration the Michael Jacksons of the world must feel...

But some lucky folks are given uncommon names, and these lottery winners can start cleaning up their online presence like its nothing. The saddest thing of all is when one of these uniquely-named lucky winners shoots himself in the foot and names his kid the exact same thing. It's like taking that lottery ticket and tearing it up.

Image: PSFK.com

The father that gives his son the same name must now compete online with his own kid for the rest of his life. It's a lose-lose situation. Either he gives up control of his search results -- thus allowing irrelevant and negative results to dominate his personal brand -- or he puts his best foot forward online and forever overshadows his child's online presence. Talk about a zero-sum game. 

Family matters are challenging enough without a life-long competition for the same small piece of online real estate. There are much more clever ways to honor your family than naming your son a Junior. Do yourself and your son a favor and give him a unique name.

28 Day Online Reputation Management Challenge -- Coming Soon.

I'm super excited about this upcoming challenge, and hopefully you are too. The idea for this came about naturally -- I was inspired by some of the activity I saw on fitness blogs and thought a 4-week challenge would be a great way to give people the direction they need to take control of their personal brands. 

Plus how can you not love the analogy between working out and getting your online reputation in shape? 

Big shoutout to some of the other BrandYourself Brand Strategists for helping me plan this.

We're knee-deep in the planning stage now, figuring out the best way to schedule 28 days of fun activities to help boost engagement, keep your media channels full of fresh and engaging content, and grow yourself a following on your social media platforms. By the end of the month, you'll have a powerful foundation -- including an awesome website -- for your personal brand.

Follow me on Twitter to keep tabs on the latest updates. Stay tuned for more info!

A Powerful, Organic Strategy to Grow Twitter Followers In Your Industry

Growing your Twitter following can be invaluable. A larger following increases the authority of your Twitter profile and broadens the reach of your own content marketing efforts. It opens up lines of communication in your industry, helps build upon your positive online presence, and offers you a pool of potential leads for your business. You’d be hard-pressed to find a downside to growing your followers.

In this post, I share a simple but effective strategy to organically grow your Twitter following with users in your industry. It’s a scalable process, so use it as much or as little as you’d like.

Let’s take a look:

The Tools You’ll Need

We’ll be using 2 tools for this process: Tweepi and RightRelevance.

1. First, connect your Twitter account to Tweepi. You’ll be using this tool to trim the fat -- that is, get rid of folks who don’t follow you back. Tweepi is an easy way to keep track of that and much more.

2. Then, connect your Twitter account to RightRelevance. We’ll use RightRelevance to easily find the users you want to follow.

The Strategy

Once you’re logged into RightRelevance, type in a category that’s related to your industry or niche. For me, I’ll try 'personal branding.'

Add it as a saved channel so you can refer back to it later.

Then click the influencers tab and decide whether you want to filter by people or organizations. I want to target individuals, so I’ve clicked the “Person” option.

Finally, decide if you want to tailor it even further by location. I want to filter my followers based on New York City, so I’ll click that option.

Now all that’s left to do is scroll down and follow the people that interest you. I’m not going to be too picky because I’ve already let the filters do that tailoring for me. I know that the accounts I follow are going to be people who fit squarely in my industry and live in my city. Perfect!

You can use this method to follow 20, 200, or 2000 people, depending on your goals and time limit. Don’t forget to switch to a new category and do the same thing all over again. I’ve already used “personal branding,” but I could also try “reputation management” and “content marketing."

The Clean-Up

Once you’ve followed a batch of users, give them a few days or a week to follow you back.

Then log into Tweepi and click on the category of users called “Not following back.”

The “not following you back” section is pretty self-explanatory. It shows you all the users who, well, haven’t followed you back. You can also see some interesting stats about when they last tweeted, where they’re located, their follower count and follower ratio.

Go down the list and “unfollow” anyone who you’re ready to cast aside. There are bound to be some people or organizations you want to still follow despite their unreturned thanks, so just keep your eyes peeled for that as you fly down the list.

That’s it!

Now that you’ve got the hang of it, try it out using other categories and other filter settings to see if you get different results. And let me know how it goes in the comments section below! 

12 Twitter Tools to Take Control of Your Online Reputation

Online reputation management is all about developing your personal brand, publishing quality content, and taking control of your search results. Twitter is an obvious choice if you’re looking to get control of your search results — it ranks well on its own and can be a powerful resource for increasing the engagement of your original content.

But there is a big difference between using Twitter like an average user and using Twitter like a pro to impact search results. First, you'll need to optimize your Twitter profile. Then use these 12 twitter tools to give you the jumpstart you need to take control of your online reputation:

1. RightRelevance

RightRelevance is one of my favorite resources for aggregating quality content all in one place. RR mines the web to consistently find and rank the most influential people and articles for any given topic. Once you’ve signed in via your Twitter account, simply add all your favorite topics to your feed (that column on the left) and then check them whenever you’re low on content.

Once you've clicked on a particular topic, you can view the ‘Influencers’ tab (across the top) to see that topic’s most influential users and find loads of people to follow in the industry. You can do it all easily right from the RightRelevance interface.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a data miner’s best friend. It shows you the most shared pieces of content for a given topic and a given timeframe. It teaches you which social networks and platforms you’ll want to target based on your industry and interests. And it is also a critical brainstorming tool because it shows you what your competitors and peers are doing. Use it to discover content, improve your content, and come up with brand new content altogether.

3. RiteTag

If you’re tweeting about ‘entrepreneurship,’ how do you know whether to use #entrepreneur #entrepreneurs #entrepreneurship or some other variant? 

RiteTag, that’s how. Simply enter a keyword and RiteTag will determine how many unique tweets per hour, retweets, potential hashtag views, etc. You can even view a historical timeline of that hashtag’s popularity over the last month. 

From my RiteTag search above, I can see that #entrepreneurs and #entrepreneurship are good but #entrepreneur is better by a long shot. Case closed. The RiteTag extension makes this even easier by integrating directly with Twitter, Buffer and Hootsuite but it only lasts for a 30-day free trial unless you’re willing to dish out a monthly fee.

4. Buffer and 5. Swayy

I go back and forth between Buffer and Swayy a lot. Buffer has quickly become one of my all-time favorite Twitter tools because of its amazingly easy queuing system. You set up as many posting times as you want throughout the week and your tweets will automatically fall into line when you add them to the queue. With Buffer’s new Content Suggestions (which will probably get better and better), you can throw ready-made tweets right into your queue with one click. Just season with hashtags to taste.

But as good as Buffer’s content is, it isn’t curated based on your interests, which is why I’m drawn to Swayy. Swayy’s content suggestion engine gets better and better the more you use it because it learns what types of content you like to share over time. Swayy also suggests users to mention and hashtags to use. (The hashtags sometimes leave something to be desired, however, so I would still stick to RiteTag.) 

Buffer lets you easily throw images into your queued tweets to increase engagement but you have to pay to schedule more than 10 tweets at one time. Swayy doesn’t make it easy to use images but it does let you schedule an infinite amount of tweets. Sigh…the debate rages on.

6. Pablo

Even if you don’t use Buffer, you should still use its younger brother Pablo. Pablo lets you create engaging social media images in under a minute. Upload a picture of your choice, pick a quick background option, enter a title, and you’ve got a custom image ready to go.

7. Canva

If you have a little more time to make an engaging social media image, then Canva is the way to go. Canva - which deserves a whole article to itself - lets you easily create stunning designs, images, infographics, and more. Their awesome templates and cookie-cutter social media sizes makes this process as easy as it can be.

8. Hootsuite

Hootsuite has become one of the standard tools for social media managers because it was early on the scene (2008) and its dashboard integrates with a whole range of social networks from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn and Google+. Heck, it even supports MySpace if you’re into that.

I actually prefer Swayy and Buffer as pure scheduling tools but one thing I will say about Hootsuite is that it makes scheduling retweets a cinch. Simply install the Hootlet extension on your browser and you’re ready to start spacing out your retweets.  All you have to do is click the little owl instead of the retweet button to throw retweets into your queue.

9. Tweriod

Tweriod helps you make the most of your tweets by analyzing your Twitter followers and letting you know the best times to tweet. It will tell you when you get the most exposure, when most of your followers are online, and when you received the most @replies. Use this simple tool before setting up your customized schedule to get the most out of your tweets.

10. WhoUnfollowedMe

One of the easiest ways to NOT get followers and quality engagement is to just follow people willy nilly and let your following/followers ratio get all out of whack. Think about it — if you follow 2000 people (the maximum Twitter will allow unless your ratio is healthy) but only have 100 people following you back, that’s a pretty sure sign that you’re a spammy user. Most users will steer clear.

That’s where WhoUnfollowedMe comes in. It helps you catch the people who once followed you but have since unfollowed you. You can quickly see who those users are and then seamlessly unfollow them back to keep your ratio clean and healthy. You can also use the tool as a great way to view the people who have followed you recently and decide who you’d like to follow back. 

11. Twitter Analytics

Twitter analytics is a really easy and useful. Simply go to analytics.twitter.com to start tracking your account with Twitter analytics. Then you can check back at any time and see a 28 day summary of your Tweets, Impressions, Profile Visits, Mentions, and Follower Growth. You can compare this month’s numbers to last month’s and can see some great highlights like your Top Media Tweet, your Top Follower, and how many impressions your Top Tweet received.

12. Followerwonk

Moz’s Followerwonk tool does a lot of things, but my favorite is the analysis feature. Simply put, it helps you figure out when your followers are online and engaged. This is critical because it gives you a great sense of how you can be more efficient with the time you spend on Twitter. Tweet when your followers are active and lay off when they’re not. 

6 Steps to Optimize Any Social Profile For Maximum SEO Value

Impacting search results isn’t as simple as it used to be. You can’t just plant a link farm or stuff keywords like crazy and expect great results. Those actions are actually much more likely to earn you a Google penalty. Today’s SEO is all about publishing quality content and driving organic user engagement. There are no shortcuts to winning Google's heart.

But, there are still 6 steps I always use as a default when building social profiles for a new client. I’ll go through them here and use my Twitter as an easy example. I ran into some classic stumbling blocks along the way, so I'll share those here and give you my thought process for each step.

Step 1: Reserve Your Custom URL 

Keywords aren’t what they used to be but search engines still look to the URL as a sign of what the online property is all about. If I want my Twitter profile to rank well for my name, it’s wise to have my name in the URL slug. That means making my username my full name.

Protip: Don’t get twitter.com/rickross if people know you by Richard Ross. 

Above, you'll see the one thing a brand strategist hates to see: the ideal username is already taken.

In this case, there are a number of directions you can go. Ryan_erskine and erskineryan were already taken as well and I’m not one to add numbers at the end of my username. So I decided on ryanerskineNY. Putting my location in the URL slug won't hurt and it might even offer a slight boost to my search results. 

Step 2: Put Your Name in the Title

It seems obvious, but step 2 is putting your name — or whatever you’re trying to rank for in search results — in the title. Search engines still take title tags seriously and I would be wasting a useful spot for my name if I didn’t put ‘Ryan Erskine’ here.

Step 3: Upload Your Optimized Image

The next thing you’ll want to do is upload a profile picture. Some social profiles automatically rename and resize your image (as Twitter does here) but it’s useful to remember this step as you construct other social profiles and web properties.

1. First, name your image appropriately. This part is easy. Rename your image on your desktop (or wherever you’ve saved it) as the full keyword. In this case, I’ve renamed my image as “Ryan Erskine” before uploading it. 
2. Optimize your image’s size. As Google cares more and more about load speed as a SEO factor, it is critical to upload images that are appropriately sized. We’re only dealing with a handful of pixels here in the Twitter profile picture, so a high definition picture would be a waste of space and load time. 

Step 4: Input Your Location

You should always determine a consistent public location to use when building your social profile foundation. Yes, there will be overlap when people search your name from different locations, but the city you input will be an important factor for search engines that tailor their results according to geography. I've used New York here.

Step 5: Link to a Property in Your Campaign 

The logic here is this: by linking to another site in my campaign, I’m taking the valuable authority my Twitter account generates and am providing an authoritative link back to my main website. 

My website, ryanerskine.com, is an important link in my campaign’s link structure, so I’m linking back to it here.

Step 6: Write a Unique Bio With Your Name

Your bio is another prime opportunity for you to use your full name or keyword. Clients sometimes feel weird about this concept of writing in the third person, but the reasoning is simple - search engines don’t know what “I” refers to, but they sure as hell know your name.

Unfortunately, Twitter leaves us very little room and I wanted to include @Brandyourself and a number of relevant hashtags so I actually skipped this step in my optimization process. 

Closing Note

This is a great place to mention a caveat. You have to pick your battles when working in the world of SEO. Sometimes what’s best for SEO isn’t best for the online branding campaign. In this case, I couldn’t fit my name because it was more important for me to have the association with my company and some relevant, valuable hashtags so I could drive user engagement. 

These 6 steps are all important defaults but they are just that — defaults. Feel free to break the rules when it makes sense for your campaign. And don’t forget to have fun!