Archive for Relationships
Social Media Marketing – 4 Tips to Have Social Media Work in Your Business
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In order to succeed in business today you need to be found online. The yellow pages are a thing of the past as most people no longer use them and use “Google Searches” instead. Have you started to build your online presence? If I “Google” you, what will I find? Here are 4 tips to help you get started. Think about how you are going to do this before you “jump right in”!
Align to your business goals. Be sure that your social media reflects your business goals and that you’re not all over the map. Remember you never get a second chance to make a first impression. When you are scattered with your information and your products you will confuse your prospective customers and clients. A confused mind never buys! If your business goal is to sell products to dog owners don’t start making blog posts about social media marketing. Unless of course you can relate it specifically to your products for dog owners.
Be technically savvy. You just can’t hide from building a presence online for your business anymore unless you are willing to pay big bucks for someone to handle every computer task for you. Find something you like to do and outsource the rest. You need to understand how it works so that you can direct the people who work with you and for you. That doesn’t mean you have to know how to do every little thing, but you need to understand the big picture. How does social media fit into your business?
Engage with people. When you build your presence online engagement is critical. Take a look at the fortune 500 companies, they have people managing their social media for them. People creating blog posts and interacting with their clients and customers. This doesn’t mean you have to be online 24/7, you can set aside a couple of blocks of time each day and engage. These blocks of time can be as little as 10 minutes 2 – 3 times per day. Develop advocates. There are people out there who will love your work! Find those people and develop strong relationships with them. They are the ones who will willingly share your work, go to bat for you when things go off the wire, provide recommendations and be a great resource for testing any new products or services.
Reward and retain all of your followers, connections, and friends. You don’t have to send the flowers and chocolates.
but if you can afford them do it! You can offer samples, free consultations, free quotes, free digital gifts or one of the 1,000’s of ways businesses reward their customers and clients. The WOW factor can really help you and does not have to cost you tons’o money. Take a look around, what are others doing? You can adopt the best practices of others and modify them to suit your business.
Social Media Marketing – Facebook, Business or Personal – How Do You Decide?
Posted by: | CommentsPersonal profile or business page. What do I need to do on Facebook?
I was recently asked a question about using Facebook for business only. There is the great risk that when you go on Facebook and you create your personal profile, which you must do on Facebook, that you will get mired down and tons and tons of personal information and sharing and connecting. This is a risk.
People sometimes have that happen to them; however, with Facebook you must have a personal profile in order to have a business page. Your personal profile cannot have your business name. It must have your personal name. If you use your business name as your personal profile, you are actually going against the terms and conditions of Facebook.
Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
- You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
- You will not create more than one personal profile.
- If we disable your account, you will not create another one without our permission.
You can however; if you are concerned about getting too caught up in Facebook, can use the privacy settings. There are a number of different ways with Facebook privacy settings where you can lock down your personal profile. You can have it so that only your personal friends see your profile and you can be very selective in who you accept as your personal friend.
I have a client who does not want to share all the different things that most people share on Facebook. She’s not interested in doing that, but she would love to interact with people on her Facebook page. It is a bit more work and you probably need help if you go that route because you don’t have a bunch of friends to ask to go over and like your Facebook page and help you spread the word that you have created it.
You have to decide exactly how you want to use Facebook and set your profile up that way right in the beginning!
It is possible to have a Facebook business page and very little interaction on your personal profile. That’s your choice. If you want to do that you just simply have to go in to the privacy setting within Facebook and say you want them as your friends only. That only your friends can view different things.
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3 Benefits of Conducting a Contest on Your Facebook Page
Posted by: | Comments3 Benefits of Conducting a Contest on Your Facebook Page, read on and discover how you can add more fans to your page and money to your bottom line.
Facebook provides excellent opportunities to boost your business and acquire new customers. However, the old saying “if you build it, they will come” is not actually true for the Internet, including social media sites. Therefore, you need to make your business’ Facebook page interesting enough for visitors to join and share it. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by holding regular Facebook page contests for your business.
#1 Benefit of a contest on your Facebook page is you will engage new customers and develop a relationship. Good content on your Facebook page will keep them participating and keen on your business. Make sure that you familiarize yourself with Facebook contests guidelines before you set one up.
#2 Benefit – Running a contest or giveaway on your business Facebook page is that you are a continual two-way dialog with consumers. Through your Facebook page contest you allow consumers to contribute pictures, videos, text, vote on favorites, play games, etc. Their preferences and participation will give you greater insight regarding their likes and dislikes and the best way to approach them.
#3 Benefit – As they become actively engage in the activities of your Facebook business page contests, they will be spreading the word to their social circle and bringing in more customers for your business. Thus, your active customers will spread your marketing messages virally and help you establish a level of trust with new customers. Independent studies have shown that people tend to trust more those businesses referred by their friends and that have a prominent presence in their social circle.
A Facebook Contest for your business provides you with many other benefits including building a community of followers around your business brand, the opportunity to build a solid customer database, and have control over safe participation on Facebook through establishing clear contest rules and guidelines for entering your contests. Plus depending upon how you structure your contest they can be a lot of fun too.
Some ideas for successful Facebook Contest for your business include asking your customers to provide their best tip regarding a topic related to your business, playing riddles, a best picture contest, trivia questions, citing the best quotes relevant to your business, rewarding them for a specific number of “shares” or “likes”. Indeed, you are only limited by your imagination and time.
Need help getting all these awesome strategies implemented? You know what you want to do but just aren’t sure how to go about it?
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What is your most recent blog post?
When your first get started online it’s pretty overwhelming when you consider all things that you need to do and a blog post is definitely something that you’re going to need to do. Once a month will not cut it. If you only post once a month, then you are not building an active following. You will not engage people online.
Stop and think about your own habits when you are online. Is it every day? Or is it once a month? Somewhere in between? You definitely need to build the muscle of writing posts for your blog. One of the great things that you can do is to test your writing muscle. Before you get started online, before your website is live or you decide you’re going to do something different, something new, just start writing your posts. Don’t publish them, just write them. Take 30 minutes 5 days a week, make it a habit.
Leave the blog posts in the back office of your web site ready to go and test yourself for a month. See how many blog posts you write. This is going to build up your blog writing muscle. Once you get started and you develop that habit, it’s a lot easier.
You need to do something every single day. Whether it’s research for a new title, research for the content or perhaps some days you’ll start a new draft. You won’t necessarily finish it but at least you’ll get it started.
The worst part is that blank page staring back at you from your computer screen. If one day you go in and insert five or six titles, maybe a couple of key points for each post the next time you go back there’s the beginning.
Be sure to post to your social media profiles about your up and coming blog posts, build anticipation.
Look for pictures, you can spend hours looking for pictures for your blog posts and you definitely do want to add pictures to all of your blog posts. Don’t be like me; learn the quick way not the hard way. Pictures will engage people more so you need to spend time researching and looking for those pictures. You may decide that you find a bunch of pictures that are relevant to one post, they don’t necessarily have to put them all into the post, you can simply put the link into the post where the picture is and then you can decide later.
Same with video, insert a video into your blog posts it encourages people to stay on your
page longer. You want that, that’s a good thing! One of the things that I do when I’m looking for video for my posts is when I like something I’ll take the link from YouTube and I’ll just put the link right into the post, when I’ve have the post totally finished I have sometimes only one, sometimes three or four, different videos to pick from.At that point when I’ve finished the blog post, I can decide which video fits the best.So how recent is your last blog post? That really is a critical question to ask yourself. If you want to engage people online and build that online community you definitely need to build your blog writing muscle. When you have this muscle built up then just like magic you have tons of content for your social media profiles.
Saturday Morning Article – How’s Your Social Customer Service? (Are You Open or Closed?)
Posted by: | CommentsThere are so many different social media platforms that it can sometimes be very difficult to decide which platforms you are going to use.
A big question you can ask yourself: Where are my customers?
And the next bigger question you can ask yourself: Are your customers mobile?
Walking down the street, going to a mall, normal everyday activities, take a look around. How many people are on their BlackBerrys, the iPhones, all the different devices that we have today? Are your customers people who are mobile?
If they are, then you definitely want to make sure the social media platforms you decide to use are mobile too. Do they have a mobile app? Be sure you check that out!
For a great Twitter example, check out cPanel. cPanel has a number of different Twitter handles, different profiles. They are split up into different topic areas for cPanel’s customers. Examples are people can complain, people can get information or they can provide feedback.
Splitting out your services into the different topic areas enables you to make sure the expert for answering those types of questions is getting only the types of questions. The will only see the questions and comments for their specific speciality, which will save you time and money in the long run.
Use different plug-ins to connect your profiles. Depending on where your customers and clients are, you may not want your blog to go to Twitter. You may not want your Twitter to go to your LinkedIn account. There are a number of different plug-ins that you can add to your WordPress site that will enable the automatic sharing of your information between the platforms. Take advantage of those.
Make sure that your message is getting out consistently to all of the different platforms that you are utilizing. You definitely need to monitor consistently, every day! (Yes I do mean Every Day) It sets a very bad example if you set up all your social media sites and then don’t use them.
Recently I found a musician that I really like on Twitter and I thought great, I’m going to be able to follow her, find out what she’s up to and what she’s doing. Only to find that it had been six months since she posted to her Twitter account. I was very disappointed. Don’t do that to your customers and clients.
Make sure that you are consistently monitoring all of your platforms and if you can’t do that by yourself, get help. It’s like going to a business in a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon and your door is closed, your door is locked and the sign says closed. The message you are sending when you are not consistently using social media you have set them up is Not Open For Business. (not good business social media!)
Don’t let your customers’, clients’ and potential clients questions go unanswered. Acknowledge them, answer them, if you can’t answer them right away let them know that you’ve seen the question and you will get back to them. Provide social media customer service you know your customers and clients are looking for.
