Tag Archives: social media marketing

Is Social Media Marketing A Fad That Will Pass? Absolutely Not.

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In today’s economy, small business owners need to use every tool at their disposal to maximize their revenues. Social media presents the savvy entrepreneur with a wealth of creative and engaging ways they can use to differentiate themselves from competitors and reach out to current and potential customers.

All things considered, social media campaigns offer one of the most cost effective way for businesses to reach out to their communities. The average person spends nearly 20% of their online time logged into one or more social media sites, and establishing your business on those same sites lets you reach out and interact with customers like never before.

Just think of some of the things you can do using social media. Effective, prompt customer service delivered directly from management to customers. Special promotional offers which can be tracked in ways you never thought possible. Consistent and clear branding which can help encourage customer loyalty.

Best of all is the incredible degree of control the correct use of social media gives you over your marketing and advertising efforts. Never again will you have to deal with the hassle of direct mail campaigns that never seem to actually convert, or waste money on ads in periodicals targeting tiny slices of your demographic.

Instead, you will have a modern, easy to interact with online presence that will help drive increased loyalty to and sales for your business. You will receive fresh, interactive content that is designed to turn prospects into customers, which will be published across a variety of social media networks. You will notice results within a matter of weeks.

So call our office today, and schedule a strategic consultation with one of our social media experts. We will offer you expert analysis of where you currently stand in terms of social media engagement, and present you with an outline of how our services can help you take your marketing efforts to the next level.

4 Tips For Making Your Social Debut

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Just a few years ago, it was fairly easy to make your social media debut. You simply created an account with Facebook and starting connecting with your customers. Now, you have quite a few more options available. Believe it or not, Facebook may not be the best site to dive into the social media ocean. This is especially true for those completely new to social media marketing or small businesses uncertain of even creating an online presence. Before you debut, you must prepare in order to be successful.

Research Your Options

If you’re just starting out with social media or have little resources available to devote, start out with a single site. This means taking the time to carefully research which sites offer the best features to meet your needs. While Facebook may seem the obvious choice, many choose to begin with Twitter since it is easier to set up and learn. You should also remember, you do have choices outside of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. New sites are cropping up on a daily basis, such as Pinterest. There are also niche sites which may help you better reach out to your target audience.

Prep Before You Market

Before you starting advertising your new social media presence to your customers, ensure you are completely ready to go public. Fill out your profile in its entirety, select a professional picture and/or background and add links (if applicable) to your website. You want to look like a social media pro, not a beginner.

Create A Schedule

Don’t create an account and expect it to run itself. Decide upfront how much time you want to devote to social media marketing and create a strict schedule. This includes advertising your presence, creating promotions and making posts. When first starting out, try to be active at least once per day and build from there.

Visit The Competition

Unless your business is completely unique, you likely have at least one competing business already on the network you choose to use. Check out their account. Notice what types of posts and promotions get the most user engagement. This is your target audience too. For those just learning the ropes, you’ll save time and make a stronger debut by doing what works instead of using a lot of trial and error.

The Top 5 Ways To Kill Your Social Marketing Campaign – Uncovered.

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Nothing is worse than carefully crafting a social marketing campaign only to kill it during the execution. Just because social media is effective for promoting your products, service and business, it doesn’t mean using it is foolproof. There is a right way and a very wrong way to do it. If you’re guilty of any of the following, stop immediately. These five ways are guaranteed to kill your social marketing campaign.

Never Update

The entire point of social media is to keep people updated. Businesses often make the mistake of simply creating a profile and posting a few posts or links. This isn’t enough. Unless you give users a reason to notice you, you’ll gain no followers and no traffic. Update several times a day, if possible, to be a true social media hero.

Post Too Often

Posting every few minutes is a major mistake. Users see this as spam. Unless you truly have something important or useful to your followers, limit your posts to no more than one an hour. You should also avoid duplicate posts as users get tired of seeing the exact same thing.

Getting Too Personal

Remember you are running a business. Keep your personal life, including your opinions, out of your social media campaign. Nothing kills a campaign faster than controversy due to political, religious or slanderous comments. Your followers may not share your opinions. Always keep posts business relevant only.

Creating A Single Strategy

Most businesses use multiple social networks. Using a single strategy for all of them means only one will succeed. Every social network is drastically different. While there are similarities, create a different plan for each to ensure you take advantage of each network’s strengths.

Ignoring Followers/Friends

Once you gain a following, nothing hurts a campaign more than ignoring those who like you. Participate with your fans. Just like with updating frequently, you must respond to messages and comments. This doesn’t mean respond to every post, but show fans you actually read what they post.

Get The Most From Facebook – 4 Quick Facebook Marketing Tips

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Now that you have begun using Facebook for marketing your business, you may wonder exactly where to begin. There is so many possibilities that it is often overwhelming. To get started quick, here are four tips you can start using today to get your business noticed in the Facebook community. The best part is all of these are free or relatively cheap.

Make Time For Customers

Set aside at least one to two hours each day for Facebook marketing. Setting up a page is not enough. You must actually be active on the page. Customers and visitors tend to come back when you update. Also, most people “Like” a page so they can see regular updates in their news feed without having to visit individual pages.

Take time to communicate with customers and fans. Answer questions posted on your wall or in the comments on posts. Post daily updates on new products, events or links to relevant information. Interact and you will gain fans.

Offer New Fan Promotions

One of the cheapest Facebook marketing methods is first time “Like” promotions. The object is to gain fans. If they “Like” your page, you offer then a coupon or something free. Visitors will quickly check out pages that give them something in return. All you need to reach is a few hundred people. They will then recommend your page to their friends. Ensure you offer a way for them to post your promotion to their own walls.

Create Pages

The biggest mistake businesses make is creating a profile instead of a page. A profile requires visitors to become your friend, opening up their information to your business. Businesses are not people. Pages work differently and allow fans to interact and join your page without sharing all their personal information. They are also far easier to customize than profiles.

Make Updates Fun

Do not just post a boring product update. Instead, have fun with the updates on your page. Post interesting links related to your business, use witty comments, make your fans laugh or post questions for your community to interact with. By engaging fans, they become more interested in your business and also recommend your page to others.

Want to Succeed? Success Lies In Social Media…

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Every business wants to succeed. Not just today, but in years to come. The way you market your business is changing. You cannot just rely on television ads or print campaigns. The road to success lies in social media. In years past, word of mouth was the perfect, low cost way to market your business. The trend has returned with a slight spin – word of mouth is now online.

The best way to discover what your customers want or like is by interacting with them. Most other forms of marketing severely limit or exclude customer interactions. More often than not, businesses simply tell customers that their product is better. There’s no real way for customers to get to know your business.

Millions of potential customers use social networks on a daily basis. This gives you not only a chance to interact, but to provide more details on your business in a safe environment users already trust. You have the opportunity to let customers know about new products and services, community activities, contests and promotions and regular details about what your business has to offer.

With a website or standard ad alone, you have to wait for customers to find your website through a search engine or click on an ad. This is not the kind of chances you want to take with your company. Profits don’t grow by simply hoping they will. When social media users have an interest in a company or product, they search for it on their favorite network. If you have a presence, they’ll like you or recommend you to friends. Then all updates appear as you post them.

You are suddenly the user’s friend. You don’t have to hope they revisit your website or see the latest ad. Your updates appear on every news feed or update list for every user that subscribes to your posts. One step and your updates go out to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fans and subscribers.

Instead of advertising every product, advertise your social network presence. This reduces the amount of ads to create and still increases website traffic and profits. Whether your business is old or new, social media is the key to success. Get attention, get fans, get business.

Why You Need To Use Multiple Platforms!

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The biggest mistake most businesses make is to only use one social media platform. In most cases, they either choose Twitter or Facebook. The truth is, one just isn’t enough. Every platform has its own benefits, but no one social media network can reach everybody. With the millions of potential customers reachable on social networks, why not take advantage of having the biggest audience possible?

While some people belong to multiple social networks, others choose just one. If you limit your company to a single network, you are missing out on the thousands, if not millions, who use a different one. In fact, there are millions of Internet users who have never ventured on to Facebook. This is a major audience you could be missing out on should you promote your business or product just on Facebook.

How To Choose

The best part about a social media marketing strategy is you actually save time by using multiple platforms at once. For instance, regular updates on promotions or new products can be sent to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. The easiest way to choose which networks you want to use is by deciding the type of audience you want to reach.

If you’re simply looking to reach many people at once, choose the largest social networks. If you are looking to reach certain niches, look for more niche social networks. For instance, to appeal to other businesses, a network such as LinkedIn may work better. Overall, try to make certain your promotions match the network you use.

The Benefits

Obviously, the biggest benefit of using multiple platforms is to reach a larger audience. The more people who see your business, the better. When you use multiple platforms, you also help take your business mobile. While some networks aren’t on board with the mobile craze, others are. This ensures you reach your audience wherever they are.

Multiple platforms also give you more options. With Twitter, you have 140 characters. With Facebook, you have longer messages with in status previews of pictures and videos. With LinkedIn, you can reach potential employees and related businesses. Even YouTube as a social network gives you the chance to show customers exactly what you have to offer.

How to Make the Most of Social Media Mistakes!

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As with most problems, the best solution is always prevention, but in a fast-paced world ruled by digital media and practically reflexive social interactions, making a slip up here in there is bound to happen. Being careful, attentive and thinking before you post should help you avoid making a huge mistake, but in case you ever post something that wasn’t meant to be said on an official account then don’t panic; these two simple tips can help you deal with it.

1. Apologize. This is a no-brainer, really, and may be all that’s needed in some cases. In the case that something that was meant to be posted on a personal account ends up on an official one, delete the content and promptly issue an apology addressing the mistake. There’s no need to make a huge deal out of it in most cases, but if something offensive or inappropriate was posted do be sure to make it very clear that the organization, company or party represented by the social account had nothing to do with it.

2. Leverage the mistake. Was the misplaced tweet funny? Did the accidental post on Facebook get a lot of likes? Has any sort of positive attention been generated in any way? If nothing negative was stated in the post then just make the most of it. If you can get away with not deleting it then leave it online to be immortalized and see how much more buzz it might generate, but do make sure to acknowledge the mistake—again—in a way that doesn’t make too huge a deal about it. Make a joke out of the situation or, if possible, find some way to use it to create a conversation with your audience.

Ready for some Twitter tips? Four fantastic Twitter tips!

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Twitter is fairly easy to use, but there are several simple ways to get a lot more out of each moment spent on Twitter. These tips will help you uncover some things about Twitter that you may not have known while maximizing your Twitter networking and marketing efforts.

1. Keep tweets super-short. Tweets have a limit of 140 characters, but you’ll be better off keeping your tweets to a maximum of 125 characters or less. Messages that use up the entire character limit are impossible to retweet and quote for replies, so the shorter you keep your tweet, the more easily other people can interact with it.

2. Don’t use a reply column. Columns help keep things organized in your Twitter client, but every time the client searches for mentions, replies and DMs it uses up an API call. There is a limit of 150 API calls per hour, so highly-active tweeps can easily run through this limit before an hour is up. Instead of making use of this column set up a column dedicated to a search of your own Twitter name. It will deliver exactly the same results without using up your API limit.

3. Position links carefully. The most common spot for links is usually at the end of a tweet, but sometimes placing it elsewhere within the body of the tweet attracts more attention since it’s less common. If it makes sense in a specific case give it a try and see how it works.

4. Create groups and give them columns. Even if your entire list of followers and followees are in some how related to your brand there is bound to be some diversity amongst them. Group them accordingly, give the most important groups columns and you’ll never have to search for the most important tweets in your feed.

What Are Your Customers Thinking? Four Ways to Find Out What Your Audience Wants!

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Creating content that appeals to an audience’s interests can seem simple in some cases and almost impossible in others, which is why it’s important to know how to leverage social media to find out what it is that they truly want to see. These four steps can help you give an audience the most simply by listening to what it is they have to say.

Ask directly. Initiating direct conversation with your audience is always a good idea. It shows initiative, creates a relationship and gives you the opportunity to get direct answers about what matters to and interests them.

Create polls. Polls basically allow you to ask the same questions and collect an organized set of answers. Ending up with a clear set of statistics is much quicker and more efficient than analyzing individual responses and since they’re quick to respond to there is a good chance you’ll actually get more responses. Polls are perfect for reaching out to large groups of people and you can always include an “other” choice with an option to elaborate so that everyone’s opinion is heard.

Check up on your social networks. Know which Facebook posts have the most likes and responses. Know which tweets are re-tweeted and favorited the most. Activity on social networks can show you what kind of content engages people the most and what kind doesn’t seem to generate much interest, helping guide future content.

Identify conversation starters. Sometimes the content that generates buzz may not be what usually attracts attention, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Take note of anything that really gets people talking, be it issues, news or simply something interesting.

Keeping content engaging and relevant is a constant and active process, but paying attention to what your audience tells you can make it world’s easier.

4 Ways to Apply Social Media Data

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One of the many benefits of most social media and marketing tools is that they offer the opportunity to collect data that can be analyzed to improve future campaigns and other business procedures. Knowing how best to make changes based upon what this data tells you can be vital to getting the most out of the information that it offers.

1. Adapt to your audience’s interests and concerns. Seeing how customers respond and react to certain messages, media and other content will help give you a good idea of what matters to them, thus allowing you to adapt your goals to reflect these things.

2. Develop your media. Social data can help you improve what you already offer on existing sites, networks and in various types of media and propaganda as well as help introduce new media and options through which to reach your audience.

3. Find outside influences. Within every audience there is “that person.” That person—or persons—speak out about your brand and have a huge impact on how other people look at it. Knowing who these individuals are is important because consumers tend to listen to and trust other consumers more than the brand in question, and following these individuals will help you see how they are influencing your brand’s image.

4. Respond to consumers. Whether it’s a matter of satisfaction, dissatisfaction or a mere need for consumer-company communication, you can create open conversations with consumers, which is the only way to create an opportunity for positive communication. Even if conversations take a negative turn, responding with genuine concern will help things end on a positive note.

Social data can offer a plethora of information that will help you develop and improve your marketing campaign, but only if you actually make use of it. As opposed to letting this data to be collected without achieving anything, apply what it tells you to improve your campaign and enjoy the results as they are compounded over time.