Brag beyond email

Newsletters give you the opportunity to share your company’s good news and do a little bragging at the same time – new products, new employees or new locations.  But if you’re going to go to the effort to develop an e-newsletter to share your company’s highlights, why limit the sharing to just an email?

There are a few ways to repurpose your newsletter’s content and disseminate this information via social media.  Here are some options:

Create Your Newsletter From Your Blog Posts – Instead of creating new articles for use only in your newsletter, post the content for your blog and have it feed into your newsletter automatically. (MailChimp’s RSS-to-email is one option). Or, include a summary of a few of your most recent blog posts in your newsletter and link back to the original post for the full article. 

Tweet every Newsletter – It’s a best practice to include a link at the top of every newsletter to view it as a web page. You should also include your address on the distribution list for every newsletter you send (one reason being that you experience getting a newsletter just like your contacts do).  Create an account with bit.ly and paste in the link at the top of the newsletter to shorten it and share it via Twitter.  Bit.ly allows you to see how many clicks your link received, as well as the source (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).

Share on Social Networking Sites – Facebook and LinkedIn allow users to post short messages either as a status update or a network update. Paste the subject line of your newsletter and bit.ly link into this box.

These options allow you to cover all of your bases to spread your company’s good news.  Email is a universal channel. The other networks mentioned above will help you reach those not on your email list with the ultimate goal of converting them to newsletter subscribers.  Don’t limit your bragging to the people who are already believers – reach out beyond your core audience!

Add an opt-in form to your Facebook page

It seems like I get two requests a week from one of my Facebook friends asking me to become a fan of their business or something they’re promoting. And that’s part of Facebook’s charm – forming groups and sharing information from friend to friend. But this got me thinking about how to take the group that’s formed as part of a Facebook Fan Page and port it over to your email list. Forming a Facebook Fan community is great, but I think there should be a way to allow folks who have joined you there to be a part of your communications outside of Facebook. And it turns out there is a way to add a newsletter opt-in page to your Facebook fan page. The Return on Subscriber blog has walked through step by step how to add this feature. Here’s a link to that post.

Of course, to do this, you’ll need to have a Fan page and the HTML opt-in form code from your ESP. Here’s the static FBML application that’s mentioned in the blog. You’re really just adding this to your Fan page and then adding the HTML sign-up form as you would on any other web page.

Be sure to check out the Return on Subscriber blog, which even includes screenshots with its instructions!