Category Archives: Social Media Tips

Social Media is all the rage. I’m having a great time learning all about it. I will share with you some of my insights along the way.

Take Charge of your Online Reputation

Posted on by May 30, 2013
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5 Simple Ways to Help Manage Your Online Reputation

We live in a world where communication is near instant, word travels unbelievably fast, and if you’re not alert your online reputation can be trashed in nanoseconds. Many aren’t cognizant how vital it is to safeguard your online reputation. Cone Communications reports that some 89 percent of consumers regard online channels are trustworthy sources, and that another 80 percent have gone so far as to change their mind about a purchase after reading a negative comment or review. Further, your social media is where they’re talking about you. The Society for Communications Research reports that 72 percent said they research companies through social channels before making purchases, and that 59% use social sites to air their frustrations about your customer service.

5 Quick Tips to protect your online reputation

  1. Check your online reputation regularly – Google yourself and your company name as a minimum once per month. Create Google alerts to inform you if there are any mentions of your names or brand. Easy, free and necessary.
  2. Claim online real estate – If you don’t own your company’s domain name, or your personal one, make an effort to try and own these. Lots of damage can be carried out in your name otherwise.
  3. Be proactive on your social sites – Like your domain name, claim any Facebook, Google or LinkedIn pages that bear your name. In addition to that, make an effort to use them regularly.
  4. Deal with any detrimental content quickly – Do your very best to deal with negative postings and complaints expeditiously. Try hard to make contact with the poster directly, offline when possible, and see if you can handle their concerns. DON’T get in to a flaming match online. You’ll be the loser.
  5. Be mindful of what you post – Use your head when posting. If this can come back and bite you or your business later, don’t post it. Those lovely pictures of you and the crew tying one on in in the strip joint are best left out of your online world.

We live in a fast-paced, information driven world. Be sure you’re on top of it to successfully manage your online reputation!

Text Message Marketing

Posted on by May 28, 2013
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SMS Marketing – Reach People Where They Live – Their Phones!

Who would have thought that text messaging, which was generally the land of the pre-teens, would morph into anything as valuable and powerful as SMS marketing? In just a very short time, SMS (simple message service) has shown to be a proven alternative option to email marketing. Achieving more and more popularity, it’s challenging to find anybody who is not using text messages in one way or another.

Why SMS marketing deserves a serious look

Without a doubt, the main reason marketers are giving SMS a try is because of how folks are responding to texts. Reported by CallFire SMS text messages boast a 98 percent open rate as well as an eye-popping 83 percent are opened in the first three minutes of getting them! What’s more, marketing promotions utilizing text messages are being redeemed at 20 percent or higher, in contrast to traditional media such as coupons, newspaper ads, radio, or direct mail, that average redemption rates of a paltry two percent. CallFire also says that your ROI (return on investment) could be far greater than in traditional media. As an example, a campaign with a monthly cost of less than $30 to send 1000 text messages, and redemption rates of 20 percent or more, works out to be less than .30 cents per customer acquisition. Not bad.

4 Recommendations for successful SMS marketing campaigns

  1. Be certain to deliver value – Be sure that you’re not wasting their time! Give great value, whether you’re delivering a palpable offer or just directing them to somewhere where they can consume more great content. Deliver Value!
  2. Keep it short, sweet and personal – Personalizing your texts and keeping them friendly and brief is a good recipe for success with SMS. Something such as, “Hi Mandy, thanks again for shopping with us! We look forward to seeing you again soon. Show this msg to receive 20% off your next purchase at [STORE NAME & PHONE NUMBER].”
  3. Include a call to action – Make sure you ask for the action you want them to do. Saying something like “Text SaveNow to 123456 to get a 10% off coupon today” will set their mind to action mode.
  4. Track your results – SMS is awesome when it comes to measuring metrics. There are a variety of things you can monitor on your campaigns, from click tracking to who opened what. So make sure you track and measure your results, to properly plan the next campaign!

Daily Deal Sites

Posted on by May 23, 2013
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Daily Deal Sites – Look Beyond What You Read

You’d think from all the hate that’s been written about daily deal sites, and the way they are all a thing of the past as a means to market your local business, we wouldn’t like them either. You’d be wrong. There’s an awful lot that goes into making daily deal sites enhance your local business, and a few well-publicized failures, shouldn’t be the reason to avoid the daily deal model. As a matter of fact, when you take a close look, the lion’s share of them “failures” had plenty in common, particularly a glaring misunderstanding of the best way to run a daily deal promotion, poor negotiation of their deals, and not keeping track of their new customers redemption and spending. Given that they had unbelievable fails in these areas, is it any wonder they failed?

So why all the hate?

The well-publicized financial and structural changes Groupon and LivingSocial have been going through are often cited causes of dislike. The press is only too quick to point out the unfavorable issues with some daily deal sites. They repeatedly point to things like spam complaints, a crowded marketplace of daily deals to pick from, “deal hoppers”, customers who hop from deal to deal and rarely become a regular customer.

3 Ways for you to help make Daily Deals work for your business

  • Understand the financials! – Be sure you clearly understand the numbers as far as your deal is concerned. Know your average sales volume and don’t exceed it with a daily deal. Negotiate credit card processing fees: most major daily deal sites will pay these!
  • Follow up with your new customers! – As many as 60-75 percent of these daily deal customers are trying you out for the first time, so it’s extremely important to have a plan to coax them back for a return engagement! Offer another coupon, or other incentives to ensure that you see them again!
  • Don’t go too big, too quickly – Start conservatively, so that you can learn the ropes and not be overloaded by the deals, and leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Daily deal sites aren’t dead, you simply need to understand how to best use them for your business.

Easiest Way to Boost Your Social Media Mojo

Posted on by May 14, 2013
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4-13-three-ways-to-increase-social-engagementTop Social Media Tips – How to Engage with Ease!

Long, long ago in an internet far away (roughly a year ago) it was not too difficult to rank your site’s pages in the search engine results. All you had to do was optimize the pages, have good, original content, and to gather a vast variety of backlinks to your pages.

Ahh, the good ‘ol days.

Google, in their quest to create a more relevant, social collection of search results, has made the game a bit more intricate. In addition to being sure we are still doing most if not all of the above tasks, social signals now are playing a vital part in the Google search results algorithm, the formula used to determine where our pages rank in the search stratosphere.

So exactly how do we create these “social signals”?

So how can we do this without tearing out all of our hair? Listed below are three easy methods for you to quickly increase customer engagement, grow your audience, and boost word of mouth regarding your business.

  1. Utilize visual media – However you slice it, the majority of us now would prefer to watch than read. Regardless of whether we are driven to this by a lack of time or the fact that it’s simply easier, that is the state of society nowadays. Backing that up, Facebook reports that pics and vids attract 53 percent more likes than text alone.
  2. Do it later in the day – Customer engagement by way of likes, shares and follows, are occurring later in the day, according to this infographic. (See, you wanted to check it out, didn’t ya!)
  3. Be quick to respond – Getting visitors to respond to you is hard enough: don’t leave them hanging! Make sure you develop the practice of responding to comments, tweets and status updates as soon as possible. You’re looking to engage, not find a way avoid this!

Don’t be like Freddie!

Professional golfer Freddie Couples was asked once why he never answers the phone. His reply was, “there might be someone on the other end.” Don’t be like Freddie! Engage with your readers!

Facebook Advertising Secrets

Posted on by May 2, 2013
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4-13-five-tips-for-facebook-imagesHow to Use Facebook Ads to Gather Leads and Sales

Facebook ads are among the fastest, easiest and most effective do-it-yourself platforms for getting traffic to your offers, building prospect lists, and for practically any other objective imaginable for your website. Ad campaigns are extremely simple to set up, include excellent targeting tools, and can be online in minutes. There is one factor to understand, however, when it comes to obtaining the best results and return on investment: That is finding the most effective images available. It has been shown that imagery is 70-89 percent of the success or failure of a Facebook ad campaign. Let’s have a look at some useful tips for obtaining the most from your Facebook ad images.

5 Great Image Tips for Facebook Ads

Creating an ad that produces a real impact and statement for your product or services is a matter of standing out from the rest. Listed below are five ways to do just that!

  1. Use very high quality stock images – As your images will end up very small, be sure you’re purchasing from a reputable resource. Fotolia and iStockPhoto are two of our faves. The XS size of available images will undoubtedly be fine, as even these are going to be cut down to the size of a postage stamp (110×80 pixels).
  2. Crop to deliver impact – Crop your photos closely to focus on the key aspect of your ad. Cropping faces from the eyes to mouth is the most impactful technique for riveting people images. Also, be sure that your model’s eyes have life. Whenever using product images, get close!
  3. Choose eye-catching colors – Using bright, visually arresting images is going to do wonders for your click-thru rates. Too many people opt to blend in with the pervasive Facebook blue, and thus consign their ads to a form of “banner blindness”.
  4. Choose attractive images – Unless you are going for a certain statement, choose the most attractive photos you can find. People are attracted to beauty. Period. This is not to say that sometimes beauty can’t be trumped by cute, funny or outrageous.
  5. Use humor whenever you can – All of us love a good laugh. If you have the opportunity to inject humor into your ad, don’t miss it! It will undoubtedly result in a higher clickthrough rate!

For some terrific illustrations of these ad-image principles in action, check out this great article at Search Engine Watch.

Smartphone App For Your Small Business

Posted on by April 30, 2013
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4-13-smartphone-apps-for-your-small-bizHow do you decide whether or not to develop a mobile app for your business?

Mobile site or mobile app? Thats the real question. Do you require one or the other, or both? Understanding your businesses’ needs goes a long way toward helping you decide if you should invest the time and money necessary to develop and put into play a mobile app for your business. Does a mobile app make sense for your company? What are the costs, both in developing one and in maintaining one? Have you got someone capable of updating it? You need the answers to these and several other questions in order to really come up with a wise decision. Let’s take a peek at a few of the pros and cons.

The Pros and Cons of developing a mobile app for your business

Pros:

  • More than 50 percent of adult Americans are using smartphone technology
  • Keeps your brand prominent in the marketplace
  • Increases customer retention and loyalty, as the app is always in front  of them
  • App users typically spend much more time on apps than on mobile sites
  • Usually load faster than mobile sites
  • Mobile apps are available offline, though users will need to login to perform any actions, such as purchases

Cons:

  • A mobile app needs to be developed for each platform, iPhone, Android, Windows, or any other platform
  • Mobile apps require ongoing care, both as regard fresh content along with technology updates
  • Mobile apps are not as easy to optimize as a mobile website
  • Mobile ads could very well serve the purpose
  • Apps can be quite expensive! If you go the Do It Yourself route, be ready for a lot of headaches, as they frequently break, and need to be updated.

We all know there are as many uses for an app than you’ll be able to imagine, however some are superior to others. Here is an example of how apps were created in the health care market. Making sure your app is useful and not a mere novelty goes a long way toward helping you make your choice. While it’s a given that you require a mobile version of your website, the question of whether or not you should shell out what might be big bucks for an app is one you ought to look at thoroughly. Take your time to weigh the pros and cons for your business before you leap into developing a mobile app!

Homepage Sins: 15 Ways to Improve Your Homepage

Posted on by April 16, 2013
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4-13-fifteen-ways-to-improve-website15 homepage sins that are costing you sales

Sometimes it’s about what you don’t do as much as it is what you do. This can ring extremely true on the subject of your website. There are lots of things that can send visitors screaming into cyberspace to escape these grievous issues. Let‘s find out if some of these sound familiar to you.

  1. No clear objective – According to DinkumInteractive.com you have about 4 seconds to convey what your website is about before they leave.
  2. Your content isn’t scannable – Web viewers read in chunks, and if they can’t scan your page and get it in a few seconds, you’ve probably lost them!
  3. Not being mobile ready – Mobile is no longer an extravagance, as according to Google half of all website traffic is mobile.
  4. Not making use of video on your site – Videos rule, but whatever you decide to do, avoid autoplaying music at all costs!
  5. No updated, quality content – If your content is from Bush’s first term, it’s no surprise they’re fleeing! Also no fancy fonts or extremely long pages.
  6. No contact information – You want to ensure your customers can contact you when they want to!
  7. Not collecting email addresses – Also a necessity. Developing a list is one of the keys to long-term success online.
  8. Not utilizing Meta tags on your website – Especially the title and description tags. These can help you to get indexed and ranked in the search engines.
  9. Lack of social sharing buttons – Like it or not, making your site be shareable on social sites is where the party is, so get over it!
  10. No or poor Calls-to-Action – You want an action from your visitors; ask for it!
  11. No clear site navigation – Don’t use drop down menus, and make sure every page on your website contains a link back to the home page.
  12. Not optimizing your images – Make sure to use the ALT and TITLE tags for any images or videos you are using.
  13. Overuse of Flash – Besides being a pain for the GoogleBot to read, it may be very irritating to your visitors.
  14. No metrics to determine your progress – Do you actually not want to learn the quantity of people are coming around and from where? What do they like, or not like?
  15. “Intro” pages – These are merely an obstacle to your content. You really want to go there? (I’m looking at you, fancy restaurants.)

How to Connect With Buyers Using Google+ Local

Posted on by March 28, 2013
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3-13-google-local-logoHow to Use Google+ Local to Connect with Buyers

Even though it’s been a few months since Google merged with Google Places to become Google Local, there was some confusion as to just what this new entity would grow to be. No longer. One shining illustration of what is possible for small business is the Google business page for BakeSpace.com. They have employed all of the features such as hangouts, video and more to garner more than 330,000 users inside their circles. Businesses are waking up to the enormous opportunity that lies within Google Local and are finding excellent ways to use it for finding buyers and prospects.

So let’s examine some of the best ways your small business can leverage this platform.

  • Be sure your Google Local page excels – The first and probably most important task is to make sure that your page is entirely filled out. Fill in all text areas that are called for, as this makes a difference in how Google ranks your page. Also, use a ton of images, because this also affects the ranking of your page. There’s also the benefit of being allowed to present a vivid look at your site and merchandise.
  • Use the search function to prospect – Using Google to look for prospects and hook up with potential customers is ridiculously easy! The search bar at the top of your Google page will help you find people who are talking about your niche or company. Add them to your Circles and start the connection process!
  • Engage with potential buyers by creating offers – An excellent way to leverage your Google Local page is to create enticing offers and coupons which can be accessed directly from that page. This can be a terrific method to convert Google visits to onsite purchases.
  • Use Google Hangouts as a media channel – There are a variety of methods to use this versatile tool to pump up your business. You can conduct webinars, training sessions, online press conferences, offer free consults (related to your business) and even host your very own show. Google records these sessions, sends you the file, which you can then upload to YouTube. Beginning to see the possibilities?

I hope you’re realizing the possibility of what Google along with Google Local, YouTube and the rest of the Google suite could do for your business. Get your business started on Google Local today!

Mobile Computing Revolution

Posted on by March 26, 2013
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How to Cash in on the Mobile Revolution

The web is going mobile, and it’s not too late to jump onboard the mobile bandwagon and snatch a slice of what is increasingly becoming an extremely large pie! Google reports that more than half of all local searches are executed on mobile devices of some sort. Everyone is doing business on the move, browsing and price comparing on the way to shop. Now is the time to make sure your business is aligned to take advantage of this mobile innovation. Here are five easy ways to get this done!

  1. Having a mobile ready site – Making certain your website is capable of being viewed on any mobile device is a mandatory first step. There is something of an art to making the mobile version of your website, because the emphasis here is on speed. It is estimated you have about five seconds for your site to load on a mobile device or they’re on to greener pastures. Make sure your site loads fast and looks great! Based on Google polling, 52% of users say a bad mobile experience causes them to be much less likely to engage with a business.
  2. Offering deals, coupons and incentives to readers – 29% of consumers indicate a willingness to download a coupon from their mobile device. Take them up on it! Currently, only 10% of customers have received a coupon from a local merchant, based on a poll from Mercator Advisory Group. It’s time for you to get out in front of this trend and stake your claim!
  3. Buy inexpensive mobile advertising – Mobile paid ads are still the new kid on the block, but there is a great deal of opportunity using these. Pricing is still quite low, and you can get a considerable amount of targeted traffic to your site very quickly.
  4. Create a loyalty program – Employing a mobile platform to institute a loyalty program is an idea that is no longer just used by restaurants. You can make rabid fans by having a simple, easy to use digital loyalty card app that works entirely on their mobile device. A fantastic way to reward regular customers.
  5. Capitalize on mobile email and SMS – Mobile email is being opened at a rate of 41%, and is on schedule to surpass the PC by the end of 2013, as outlined by MarketingLand.com. SMS (texting) posseses an incredible 95% open rate. These two statistics alone should be incentive enough to get your small business seriously involved in the mobile side of things!

Social Media Mistakes

Posted on by March 21, 2013
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Are You Making These Costly Social Media Marketing Mistakes?

Understanding what NOT to do in regards to social media is nearly as critical as knowing what you should do. Below are some social media slipups to avoid at all costs!

Jokes at other people’s expense – It should go without having to say, but you really need to think before you send anything out into cyberspace for the world to see. Above all, don’t try and take advantage of someone else’s bad luck or indiscretion to promote your own products or services. While a celebrity death or embarrassing scandal might appear to be easy fodder for attracting eyeballs, you’re almost certainly going to tick off as many people as you tickle!

Offensive statements and political rants – Closely connected is the temptation to broadcast your preferences political, social or otherwise, which may well have the misfortune of NOT aligning with those of your clients and customers. Don’t go there! Keep from sharing anything that might be misunderstood, or you’ll end up scrambling for cover! Once trust is broken, it’s very hard to rebuild.

Not making business only accounts – An account solely devoted to your business has not only a far greater chance of being found in the search engine results, it projects an altogether more professional image for your business.

No social media buttons on your website – These are readily available for all social media platforms, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot if they’re inaccessible on your homepage and every post you make. This makes it easy for your readers to share your posts and in doing so help promote your business.

Not using your social media profiles to link back to your site – You’ve gone to all the bother to create and use these social sites, why not take the free, authoritative link they’re offering back to you! Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google all permit you to link back to your website. There’s five great links to your site, and a great chance for your (hopefully) many followers to end up on your site.