When businesses are thinking of to get into Twitter, and set up a Facebook business page they often are afraid what people can say about them. Maybe they could complain and other will see this and they could lose business and reputation.
But the opposite is the fact!
You should be thankful for everybody who is complaining on Twitter and Facebook. This gives you the opportunity to get in touch and to explain your position.
You better should be worried about the people who do not complain but turn away disappointed from your business and you don’t know why and how to reach them to get the issue fixed.
To simplify social media and to make it work by 100 % for your business you should include all people which work in you company to showcase what they do and to communicate with your customers.
This can be done trough a corporate network of blogs where anybody can write about any topic he or she interested in, independent from the company topics. The same way IBM already does.
You can also motivate the whole staff to Tweet and to get the word out about the company, news, events other interesting topics. The same way like Zappos does.
Activities like a corporate network of blogs, Twitter and Facebook can show a human site of our business and motivate future customers to get in touch with you. The recent customers can become “evangelist” for your business and become your most valuable asset in social media marketing!
To benefit from this tremendous business potential which social media offer to you, you should change your thinking and turn away from the dogma that you have to and must control any communication of your employees!
You need to have effective social media policies in place, train your staff and the most important TRUST your employees and show them that you are willing to hand over control to them.
You also need to ensure yourself that anybody in the company understands the responsibility which accompanies this strategic move! A great way is to establish a self reacting control based on trust where everybody is looking what the colleagues are doing to prevent mistakes.
If anybody misuse trust, than it works like in any other company and business where employees misuse good will. Say good bye to this one and go ahead to work with them who understand and are trustworthy.
Ask your employees to give 100 %, care the same way and take responsibility as you do. Leave them space to make their own decisions. And the one who don’t want to, fire them and look out for people who want!
Here are some ways you can deal with ugly messages in social media:
1. Put the truth out for everybody to see it.
2. Communicate with the person which puts up the negative comment.
3. Be thankful for every customer which gives you a negative comment. He still wants to talk with you!
4. Listen to your customers.
5. Treat your customers ALWAYS with respect.
6. Try to satisfy realistic requests.
7. Show that you care, step back and express regret.
8. Try to offer an alternative.
9. Get into debate and state your point of view.
10. Keep the conversation objective, polite, civil and honest.
As your conversation will stay online forever, anybody can see it and track how you have responded. This can rule about the way how the people perceive you and your business in the future. Keep this in mind!
—How do you deal with ugly Tweets and bad Facebook comments? I am looking forward to your comment.
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An IBM study found study found out that about 26 % of chief marketing officers track blogs and only 40 % follow any online communications. And the most shocking is that about 82 % still rely on traditional “old school” market research to plan their marketing strategies.
As social media is two way communication and offer tremendous opportunities for companies to get in touch with their audience this seem like somebody has not activated the phone or fax while somebody is scared of communication!
Companies like Coca-Cola, Nike, DELL, and Starbucks, only to mention a few shows how important social media and the conversation is which is taking place there. Companies which engage their target audience in social media show them that they care and are willing to listen what their audience is talking!
As a business which is active in social media you get direct feedback for your product and the chance to improve and evolve them that way your audience wants to buy them.
Companies which embrace social media and the opportunity to step into conversation will be the winners, there is no question!
Studies prove that companies which transform their communication skills to social media gain more trust and strengthen their brand.
Here are some simple steps how companies can step into social media conversation!
1.) Create a social media policy. There are a lot of examples only which you can use to get ideas.
2.) Get active and build a corporate blog where you publish information about the topics your audience cares of.
3.) Spread those blog articles in social media like Twitter, Facebook and also in LinkedIn if you are B2B focused.
4.) Listen to the conversation in social media networks and if you have something beneficial to contribute do it, if not listen further.
5.) As you are in conversation keep the water cooking and ask open questions, ask for recommendations and critics and answer your audiences’ questions.
6.) Be always honest! Do not even try to hold something back.
7.) Be authentic! People forgive mistakes but they not forgive to be ripped so easily!
8.) When you get critics than deal with it in a professional way! Critics and complaints are great to step into discussion and show your point and to show that you care and are willing to improve your products and services.
9.) Measure your doings to learn where the social media conversation is leading your business.
As social media is no trend it will not vanish and Chief Marketing Officers should very quickly embrace this powerful communication channel.
If you still believe your audience is not in social media than prove this by doing research there for your industries top key words or for your competitors and you will see by yourself if other companies have already take action there to get in touch, maybe with your recent customers.
—What have been your experiences with social media for your company? I am looking forward to your feedback.
When Google+ was launched some people had the opinion that it will destroy Facebook in a short time period. Within the first weeks which have been running under invitation only to get an Google+ account, Google+ as been able to register more than ten million users.
Some observer had the opinion that a big exodus from Facebook to G+ will happen and maybe Facebook had the same in mind when they begun to close loopholes to expert contacts to Google+.
But this has not happen. Sure users which use Facebook are also on G+ now but no exodus took place.
The last estimations about the number of G+ users go in a range of 40 million and up. With its 750 million and daily growing base of global users Facebook does not need to be scared of G+ yet.
Imagine you went several years back and had the chance to register with Facebook when they had about 40 million users. Can you imagine how big your possible network could grow and how far would be your brands range globally?
This is your chance now to turn the wheel of time several years back and get into the game. Probably this will be your last chance to become part of massively growing social network for the next ten years. Position your business now, before you competitor does!
G+ actually offer personal profiles only but is also experimenting with company profiles similar as Facebook Pages.
The best thing what you can do as a business person or marketer is to register a personal profile with G+ which is now open for everybody and help your employees and coworkers to do the same.
G+ is ruled by the social networking rules too!
Build relationships and communicate in a professional and beneficial way to your Circles! This will help you to increase the number of connection and when the day has come that you can register your business page on G+ than you hopefully have a large and influential audience with which you maintain good relationships. This could jumpstart your G+ Business Page in a very powerful way.
To take action now can make huge a difference for your business. As G+ and social media are no secrets anymore, simply any business is tried to get a share of the cake.
Businesses that wait will be left behind and have to fight an uphill battle reach a reasonable position, but will never overtaking those who came first. That’s for sure!
Here are some simple tips for you to take advantage of G+ NOW!
1. Go to Google and register a G+.
2. Complete your profile and upload a personal picture.
3. Research who of your business partners and other connections is actually on G+ and invite them.
4. Place the G+ widget on your website and blog so your visitors can use this as an opportunity to connect with from there.
5. Look daily through your STREAM and see if you can contribute to your Circles news or if there are interesting information which you could share.
6. When some of your Circles comment your info than this are you weak up call to start the conversation. Ask some open question.
7. If you operate your own corporate or personal blog you could share your latest post in your STREAM.
And as you are waiting for the G+ Business Page to come you have the opportunity to get into G+, build your circles, expand your reach and set you and your business in advanced position. And this all with no pressure or any deadlines!
–How about you, how do use G+ actually? I am looking forward to your comment.
Today as I went through LinkedIn a group got my attention. It was the group about Online Lead Generation which I am a member of and where I contribute if there is a topic where I can help?
But today I went through the posts and I thought OMG, they are talking about buying leads. The word “Business Suicide” went through my brain.
Especially one provider caught my attention and I went to look into his background. This provider claimed to „generate thousands of real time leads in just about every vertical”!
Puhh I thought, this is a tough proposition and let’s see what’s behind them! I checked his website and guess what?
- An Alexa Rank of only 2,170,186 (means about 5 -10 unique visitors daily)
- 13 Google Indexed Pages (lesser pages means, lesser chances to get indexed and found on the search engines)
- Only 92 Backlinks (Qualified back links are one of the SEO strategies to get found, the more the better)
- No Corporate Blog (content marketing through blogging is the key to get found and to get leads)
- No presence in social media: no Facebook Business Page and no Twitter (43 percent of all online consumers are social media fans or followers, if you are not there you are missing them)
No Web DNA…. (maybe a ghost )
I asked him two question, I am curious if I will get any educated answer.
Q: How did you establish a business relationship to those leads?
Q: Why should those leads do business with the people who buy those leads from you?
Disussion Update
If you like to follow this discussion on LinkedIn, you can find it here.
Why did I done this you might ask?
Simple answer: I was shocked by that proposition made there and more shocked me that businesses believe this kind of fairytales and put their business on risk without to know what they are doing!
To buy leads is a waste of time and money and WILL harm the reputation of your business FOR SURE!
When you buy leads it is the same like you open the yellow pages and start cold calling from A-Z.
The people you reach do not know YOU, they did not requested to be contacted from YOU and they did not explained an interest in YOUR products and services previously!
By buying those leads – their addresses and bother those people you only show one thing, that your business has no USP and your products and services have no value for them.
You ask why?
If it would be the opposite you wouldn’t be dependent on paid leads! Instead of you would generate leads and customers automatically!
Boooom. You don’t like what I say!
So before you think about to pay for addresses, you should ask yourself why do you need to buy them and why do you not generate enough recommendations and leads from your existing customers actually?
To purchase leads is only a drip onto the hot stone. This will not solve your long-term issue and will not bring you closer to your business goals.
The opposite is the fact: The longer you depend on bought leads the more your chances will decrease to gain a competitive advantage!
Believe it or not you will loose business in the long term!
Stop buying leads and start build relationships. Build trust and credibility through content publishing (blogging) and two way conversations in social media. This is where you can generate highly valuable target leads with an PROVEN up to 55% conversion rate.
Start inbound marketing strategy by starting your own corporate blog ASAP!
Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Inbound marketing can help you to:
A. Save up to 62% of your marketing budget.
B. Stand out of your competition.
C. Generate a massive amount of leads.
D. Get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates.
E. Increase your customers and sales.
“Get seen and you get visited! “
— How about you? How are your experiences with bought leads?
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Is mobile marketing recently a part of your inbound marketing strategy?
More and more people worldwide use mobile devices daily to access the web, to shop and to network on social media sites. Social sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have apps out there to make it dump easy to communicate and update the network from the run.
To ignore this growing mobile marketing trend could be a very dangerous failure for your business!
To get your piece of the pie from this trend the first thing you need to do is to optimize your website and email communication for mobile use!
Did you thought about to make use of mobile apps to improve your location based marketing?
Services like Foursquare are best examples how businesses use location based marketing to reach a wider audience.
Some facts:
People are increasingly use mobile devices to access content on the web!
In March 2011, nearly 39% of US mobile subscribers were browsing the internet using their mobile device. That’s up by 2.2 percentage points from just 3 months prior.
Mobile apps are almost as popular as browsers; 37% of subscribers used downloaded apps.
Subscribers are also increasingly using social networks on their phones. In March, 27.3% indicated they used a social network on their mobile phone, up from 24.7% just 3 months prior.
Source: HubSpot
Actually about 30% of companies who are using Mobile Marketing do strategic lead generation through this! With only one third of the companies you and your business still have wide opportunities to position in this area!
As this trends evolves more and more businesses get ready to get there communication done in the mobile and location based marketing area, you should not wait to get active here. Otherwise you are put on risk to get left behind.
An uphill battle later could cost you more than to be with the trend now!
Most people who are interested to market their business on the web and especially in social media become overwhelmed of the necessary tasks which need to be done to achieve any serious results.
They feel that they need to handle an avalanche of information and requirements to get the necessary steps done.
And I fully agree with this. Inbound marketing which also includes, content creation as blogging and marketing this content through social media channels is a very time consuming business!
As any other marketing activity you cannot expect to do all the necessary tasks at once. You also need a strategic plan where you set timeframes to do your necessary inbound marketing tasks and which you can stick to. Discipline is a key factor!
Above in the title I ask how to eat an elephant? This is very simple, bit by bit!
As any other work you need to split your inbound marketing in daily tasks. You have five working days you can use. You need to determine how much time you can invest daily and from this point you can start.
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Content creation – blogging
As blogging is a key factor for lead generation we suggest to blog no matter which kind of other content you have or want to publish!
Which kind of content is the best fit for your target audience, your buyer personas?
Can you reach your audience with video, eBooks, reports, whitepapers, and pictures, blog commenting or any other piece of content?
Find out which kind of content has the best opportunities in your industry, and this does not mean it must be the same old way like your competitors do it! Be creative. When you competitor does eBook, than you can do video! When they do video than you can do eBooks! To get ideas and inspiration just look through other industries how and what kind of other content thy produce.
Social Media / Forums
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and industry related forums are great place to get seen from your future clients. These places are also great to improve your of page SEO. When you are active there, means when you get into the conversation and share your content there than you increase your chances to found in the search engines!
Lead Generation / Conversion
Content creation and social media marketing are great tools to drive interested visitors to SEO optimized landing pages (lead capture pages) to get them into you database to follow up and to make them paying customers through the time.
Lead Nurturing
As you generate leads you should stay in touch with them. But avoid sales pitches. Instead of do the same which whom you have generated your leads. Inform them with interesting and share worthy content, solve problems, answer questions and simply stay in touch with them, stay visible!
Closed-Loop Analysis
Analyze your doings to determine where your lead and revenue coming from measure refine and improve your content creation, social media marketing, lead nurturing and analysis.
Repeat this process above!
Example: The daily inbound marketing tasks!
Monday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Tuesday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Publish blog article 30 minutes
Market blog article in social media
Wednesday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Thursday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Publish blog article 30 minutes
Market blog article in social media
Friday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Check analytics 15 minutes
Refine tasks 30 minutes
———
To effectively profit from your web marketing efforts you should plan to invest about 2.5 hrs. daily and more, this depends on your business goals.
You also can split this work to different persons in your company.
– What do you think and how get you the daily web marketing tasks done?
The Technorati Study: “State of the Blogosphere 2010” shows Corporate blogs have become a powerful business marketing tool for companies.
With the increasing demand of finding new and creative ways to get the attention of future buyers and recent customers, corporate blogs are established as a trust and credibility building way to show expertise and to get in touch with target audience.
Companies like IBM use blogging to get seen online. Every person there who wants to write a blog gets the chance to write about the things they are interested in, not only about IBM related products.
As blogging is a clear way of communication a business should be authentic and communicate in a human way to become successful with their blogging, content and social media marketing.
Businesses that blog expand their blogging engagement with the help of strategic social media engagement to spread their content and to step into a two way conversation with their audience. Studies show that 57% of companies who blog get customers through their blogging effort!
Blogging used with the power of social media sharing brings blog posts to a wide audience. This audience is interested in this kind of content as it is their primary source to research for products and services on the web.
“Reach” is the key factor which decides the success or failure of a corporate blog.
These days buyers’ research proffered on blogs and in social media to find products and services.
4 reasons to start a corporate blog:
Blogging companies get up to 55% more Traffic.
Blogging companies get up to 97% more Inbound Links.
Blogging companies get up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines.
Blogging companies get up to 25x times more business leads.
These numbers are good reasons for a business to consider blogging for content marketing!
Blogging is the basic way of content marketing. Which means it is very easy to start with reasonable marketing investment.
There is clear context between the number of published articles, website traffic and generated business leads. The more articles are published the more outposts are there to get found from future customers on the web.
To be successful with corporate blogging, increase reach, web traffic and leads it takes these points:
— Publish high quality articles, which are interesting and share worthy.
— Participate in social media and in top rank forums to gain larger exposure.
— Submit your blogs to blog directories and to top ranked Blog Search Engines.
— Offer free reports to visitors to increase their interest in your website.
There is no question that businesses who utilize blogging gain a massive competitive advantage against those who do not blog.
LinkedIn has about 100 million users from all over the world and the majority of 56% comes from outside the US.
As the biggest business related social network, LinkedIn offers large opportunities for B2B to get in touch with future and to stay in touch with recent business partners.
LinkedIn offers a wide toolset of features to get seen from future business partners. To list all of them would lead to far. But let me mention some which you can use right away.
For your profile:
You personal profiles are the first stage you have to reach. Register with LinkedIn and complete your profile. Take care to use keywords related to your business. This makes it much easier for the search engines to index your profile and for future customers to find it during their research online.
-Twitter stream
You can add your Twitter stream to your LinkedIn profile. This stream can encourage visitors of your to become more curious about what you do.
-Publications
Ad your publications and a web link where your profile visitor can read or download them. So you can lead visitors of your profile directly to landing page to get them registered as lead.
-Ad your blog
Here you can add your blog RSS feed and all blog articles you publish will also be visible on your personal LinkedIn page.
-Recommendations
A great way to capture attention is when other people talk about you and your qualities. Her you have the opportunity to ask for recommendations of your network members you already have worked with. This can increase your credibility with people who did not know you before.
-Additional Information
Here you can add your websites with up to three links, your Twitter with up to two links and your interests which can be made of keywords to get better found from search engines.
LinkedIn Company Pages:
This is where you can introduce your company to the LinkedIn audience.
-Overview
Here you can write a brief description about your business and how it benefits the future customer.
-Recent Tweets / Recent Blog Posts
As in the personal profile you can add your Twitter account to make your Twitter stream visible on LinkedIn as well and your corporate blog to show your blog articles on your LinkedIn company page.
-Careers
Here it is where you can post jobs on LinkedIn to find candidates on the world’s largest professional network.
-Products & Services
This is my personal favorite of all LinkedIn company page features. Here you have the great opportunity to introduce your products and services to you audience. You can add a description and a picture of the product or service. This is a valuable opportunity on the world’s largest professional network with it 100 million users!
-Analytics
To know what’s going on your LinkedIn company page is important for you. By this analytics tool you get a clear picture what going on, on your company page. So you can measure, observer and improve your LinkedIn marketing.
Keep in mind that all of the above described features are for free. The only thing you have to do is to make seriously use of them. By seriously use those above features you empower your LinkedIn to a powerful business outpost for your company. An additional toolset of chances to get attention, visitors to your website and business leads to increase revenue and profit.
It is as simple as that! Get on LinkedIn be persistent and serious about the goals you want to achieve from your LinkedIn marketing time investment!
–What do you think about LinkedIn for business? I am looking forward to your comments below.
The average internet user is watching 30 minutes of video online daily! These people mostly lookout for entertainment.
This opens wide opportunities for your business to get your products and services in front of potential future buyers when they are looking.
The use of online video is growing as people also increasingly watch videos from their mobile devices.
Videos made as product pitches are not a good bet to attract interested people. Also image videos do not work as a potential viral marketing tool.
Your business should use online video to inform and to entertain your audience. Take care to also optimize your video for mobile. As the smart phone use grows you should keep in mind that these users are also able to see your videos on their mobile devices. Here is an interesting article about video sizes.
Smartphone Trends Infographic:
For information / education: You can show your products in action or explain product features in a more understandable way through video. Let your satisfied customers talk about your products and publish and market those videos everywhere on the web.
Watch this video:
For communication: You can do a video blog, where you instead of to write articles can do videos. Steve Garfield’s video blog.
Steve Garfield is a videographer and video blogger based in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the Internet’s first video bloggers, Garfield began experimenting with the technique in 2002 and launched his own video blog on January 1, 2004.
For entertainment: Nobody says that a product video needs to be boring! You can be creative and do an entertaining product video which people like and share.
Watch this video:
If you have a lack of ideas just crowd source your video to your audience, for example to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
Do a contest for the best crowd sourced video! So you can create a buzz on the web, get a lot of attention from your target audience, a ton of creative videos online which mention your brand and can lead further interested people to your business.
Online Video Facts Infographic:
The easiest way for you to profit from online video for your business is to do videos by yourself and publish them in your corporate blog on Youtube, Facebook and other videos channels on the web.
You can simply start your video by using the camera you already have. This can be the cam from you smart phone or any other cam you have. Start doing videos of your company and your products. Ask your collages to explain one of your products in plain English and upload, add a descriptive title, tag and describe this video to help search engines to index it and your audience to find it.
Embed it to your website, write a blog post about the video topic and embed it in your corporate blog. Market it on your social media channels and ask for comments and opinions.
Than do the next video and so on.
Don’t try to do a perfect video. There is no such thing like a perfect video on the web!
With the time you will get a better routine and your videos will become better and better. But this will only happen if you start doing them.
— How do you use online video for business? I am looking forward to your comment below.
Social media has become an important communication channel for businesses online. Its importance is growing by the technology developments for social media analytics which enable businesses and there for marketing responsible employees to exactly show the ROI of social media marketing to their executives!
Companies increasingly embrace social media and the other important strategies like content marketing and real time marketing an
Social media sites like Facebook with its more than 750 million users, Twitter with its more than 280 million users and the business network LinkedIn with its more than 100 million users offer wide opportunities for businesses, not matter if they are B2B or B2C, to get seen and to get in touch with their future customers.
One billion humans are online world wide and when you take a closer look at the numbers above you can clearly see that it looks like that almost every online user seems to be active in social med.
That leaves only one conclusion, that your future customer is active in social media as well! Which leaves a second conclusion, that your competitor is their also!
Take look at this Social Media Infographik:
“53 percent of people on Twitter recommend companies or their products in their tweets.”
“42% of companies active on Twitter report that they have got new customers through Twitter.”
“Dell was the first company which published their results of Twitter marketing. They made eight million dollars from their Twitter marketing within one year.”
Twitter has more than 280,000,000 users worldwide. So it seems that about 28% of the global online population is on Twitter. These people are all potential future clients for any branch of industry.
Do not cheat yourself by trying to convince yourself that your customers are not on Twitter. For sure they are, so you should hurry to get in touch with them there before your competition takes this opportunity because while you are hesitate.
So what can you do to take advantage of Twitter for your business?
1st Register with Twitter and complete your profile and customize it.
2nd Start to observe the conversation related to your industry. To do this you should download and install TweetDeck. Set you brand name and look if it is mentioned. If mentioned, respond in real time if necessary.
3rd Go to Google Alerts and set Alerts for your name, your company brand, your products, your best customers and your top ten competitors. These alert will be delivered directly to you email box as news appear. This keeps you updated and by the way you monitor your brand name mentions, which offer you the opportunity to respond in real time if necessary.
4th Lookout for your competition and invite their followers to your Twitter.
5th Connect with your audience on Twitter and start the conversation.
6th Share interesting and helpful content. Not only yours but other content from other sources as well.
7th When you publish your own content include a call to action which directs your reader to dedicated landing pages.
8th Do Twitter exclusive specific promotions for your Twitter followers. Direct them to landing pages for lead generation.
78% of online consumers research online before they buy! They research preferred in blogs and their social networks.
Can your future or existing customers find you in social media? Are they able to find you when they research on Google, Yahoo or Bing?
By engaging in social media you increase your chances by about 54% to get found from your target audience when thy research for products your business also has to offer.
By listening to the social media conversation you can discover what’s talked about your brand and what kind of expectations, challenges and interests your target audience has for your.
To be active in social media makes people aware of your brand and gives your business the opportunity to step into a real time two way conversation with your audience.
You get the opportunity to gain trust and credibility and to be there with helpful and share worthy information before you ask for business!
Moreover this 2 two way communication shows you the expectations of your target audience for your products and services. When you listen carefully your audience tells you what, when and how they want buy from you.
You can tailor custom products and services to fulfill your audiences needs and expectations and you can improve existing products and your support to solve your audience’s problems and serve their demand when they need it!
Imagine which kind of impact such knowledge could have on your business and your competitive advantage you can gain over your competition by simply engaged in social media.
An average Facebook user has about 130 friends. When they share your brand to their friends and his friend’s share your brand to their friends and so on, can imagine how far your brand can be spread online?
How can you reach those 43 percent of all online consumers with your brand message?
1.) Start a blog
Companies that blog get about 55% more traffic to their websites. More than a half of them generate new customers through their blog.
To find blogging topics is easier than you think. Just go through your customer requests and questions your audience has about your products and services. For example, you can write How-to’s and publish them in your blog.
2.) Engage in Facebook
67% of B2C and 41% of B2B report that they got new customers through Facebook. Simply go to Facebook and register a personal account first. Complete this and start a business Page as the second step. Find your audience in other business pages and groups and start listening. If you have something helpful to contribute to the conversation than do it otherwise listen and learn.
3.) Engage in Twitter
42% of companies report that they have got new customers through Twitter. Register a Twitter account and start listening to your audience. The same procedure on Twitter: If you have something helpful to contribute to the conversation than do it otherwise listen and learn.
Make yourself interesting and attractive by publishing interesting and share-worthy content on the web through your corporate blog and in social media. Ask your audience for their opinion ask questions about their opinion about your brand and your products. Get the conversations starting and keep it running.
The more content you publish on the web, the more outposts will be online which can be seen and lead traffic to your website.
You will not reach all of the 43 percent of all online consumers with your brand message, but much more than before.
– Do you have experiences with social media marketing for your business now and how are they? Let me know what you think and leave your comment below.
Facebook is accessible in 70 languages and has about 750 million users worldwide and there is actually 1,5+ million active business pages online.
There is no doubt if you want to reach your target audience the chances are good that they are on Facebook.
Facebook has become a true business machine which has the power to lift up business in the same speed like its progress. Groupon and other popular brands have experienced this effect in a very successful way. Not to mention the thousands of small businesses who have embraced social media networks like Facebook.
With its massive global reach Facebook has become some kind of a state by its own. And with its technical possibilities like Pages and apps it offers a large toolset for businesses to get seen on this powerful globally accessible network.
But what’s in for your business you will ask now?
My question: Are you active on Facebook, because if not, than nothing. But if you are seriously active in Facebook than this question should have been answered in a positive way yet.
Businesses which want to be active in Facebook but don’t know how to make it happen have two options:
1.) They can do the steps by them self, because there is a truck load of free information on how to establish a business outpost on Facebook. The only thing a business needs to get started is to do the first step and to register a personal account on Facebook. From there you can do one step behind another. From completing your Facebook profile to the registration of a business page.
2.) Or you could shorten your learning curve and save time and money through trial and error by hire a professional agency to help you with your social media marketing like Facebook.
Facebook is a great place to get seen from recent and future customers. Moreover you can attract new customers targeted through the help of Facebook and direct them to your business and your products.
Facebook can become your automated 24/7 business leads machine if you know how to handle it.
How mentioned above there are more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, videos, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
You could be one of those smart marketers who are doing content marketing on Facebook to generate new business leads.
Facebook offers you to connect your corporate blog with your personal profile and your business page. So every time you publish a blog post it is also showing up on your personal profile and your business page.
Also you can connect your Twitter with Facebook. Every time you tweet something it also shows up on Facebook.
These above are great ways to spread your content to reach your target audience.
Facebook pages offer you the opportunity to establish custom tabs with your content which you can also optimize for SEO.
By the way when you use Facebook, take care that all what you write there is SEO optimized and tagged the right way. This makes it easier for search engines to find your content and to index it.
Facebook pictures are also in the game of content marketing. Pictures are content as well. Upload pictures from your products and events and describe and tag them right.
Facebook video: A great way to show videos from events, product description and testimonials of satisfied customers.
Avoid speaking about you self. Publish interesting and share worthy content. Publish content with your audience in mind. Allways have your target audience in focus!
Again! Take care that all what you write there is described correctly, SEO optimized and tagged the right way. This makes it easier for search engines to find your content and to index it. Social media marketing is the new SEO.
Marketing takeawy tipp: To publish and market your content on facebook will increase your brand recognition and your credibilty. Produce share worthy and helpful content with your audience in mind.
More interesting is that 20 percent of searches on Google each day have NEVER been searched for before. So every day 20 percent of chances are completely new with new search terms which include products and services.
People hear from their friends’ info about products and services and then they go to their favorite search engines and try to find more information on.
What does this mean for your business? More and more people research online on search engines before they buy products and services. The chances are good that an interesting amount of your target audience is also looking for products and services on the web which you also have to offer.
The chances are also good that those people do not know your business and what you have to offer.
And here is your big opportunity to profit from this fact.
Here are some tips how you can get more seen on the web:
To get found online you need to be active and visible there where your audience is. The best and proven way to get seen on the web is content marketing. Content marketing is very simple and easy to do.
You should publish interesting and share worthy content on the web and market it in social media.
Content is everything you have from your business which can be published online. For example photos, articles, videos published on Flickr, forums, social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, document and video sharing platforms like Slideshare and YouTube.
But it is not enough to publish the content. To tag it right with long tail keywords and include a keyword rich description can also help to get it found on the search engines.
By publishing content through a corporate blog every blog article you publish becomes an outpost of your business online.
Market your blog articles in social media. Social media content is indexed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and your social media activities increase your chances to get found on search results of search engines from people who are looking for products and services you also have to offer. Social media marketing has become the new SEO!
Companies who blog generate more traffic and more business leads.
Find further spaces to publish other kind of content and repeat this. Make content marketing to an important part of your marketing strategy.
The more outposts you establish online the more chances you have to get found from future clients.
Published content increases the brand recognition of a business and can earn a trust and credibility with its target audience. The more interesting content a business publishes on the web the higher are the chances that people will find it also interesting and share worthy and share it with their friends and their social network. This spreads your brand to undefined reach and attracts attention from people which did not know you before.
This effect multiplies! The more content, the more outpost, the more chances to get shared and to get seen from new people the more potential clients you will attract to your business!
Companies which do the content marketing strategy seriously get the most traffic through their outposts on the web. The content there is indexed by search engines and appears in search results when the used keywords are typed into search engines!
Smart companies direct this “outpost traffic” to optimized landing pages to generate business leads, to get new customers and increase revenue!
Marketing takeaway tip: Start to publish interesting and share worthy content on the web and market it on social media. The more content you publish, the more your chances will increase to get found from future customer.
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If you are in B2B than this data could be very interesting for you! Moreover if you read them backwards you can learn how to overtake about 33% of your competition by simply measure your marketing ROI.
A new research done be Sagefrog Marketing Group and reported be eMarketer found out that about 33% of B2B companies did not track return on investment (ROI) at all.
Do you measure your marketing ROI? If not yet you should do it as soon as possible. To measure the marketing ROI is easier than you think.
What does this mean to your business when you are selling primarily to B2B?
When you actually are able to measure your marketing ROI effectively this could mean that your marketing department is working closely with your sales department to generate and to close leads. This also means you have set efficient CRM and follow processes to support your lead to customer conversion, measurement and reporting.
But if you have not already done these steps above than you will need to rethink your business strategy if you want to overtake about 33% of your competition by apply these simple tasks and processes to your business.
To apply powerful marketing ROI measurement you will need to invest time, effort and money. You will need to do an audit of your whole business and recent processes to learn where you stand at the moment.
From this point you can do a plan to execute your pathway to marketing ROI measurement and to overtake the mentioned 33% of your B2B competition. But be aware that your competition is also not sleeping and they read the news and such reports like this as well. So you should start right away to improve your market position.
Here are some quick steps you could do make your marketing ROI more visible:
- Measure your traffic and the traffic sources.
- Find out which of your pages attract the most traffic and the how long the visitors stay on those pages.
- Optimize those pages and include effective business lead generation tactics on those pages. You could do call to action and you could offer more bonus info by registration through a short form.
- Segment the generated leads to track the best and most successful lead sources.
- When you push a new lead to your sales, than they should touch the lead ASAP and report the recent lead outcome. They should do this with an effective CRM. By the way Microsoft Excel is not an effective CRM system. Instead of you could use one of the several very high qualities and less cost hosted solutions on the market.
- Track the way of each lead from the visit at one of your websites, the registration on a landing page, the push to a sales person, through the lead nurturing process and the closing.
- Establish reliable and track able communication ways between marketing and sales so things can be improved in real time.
- Make the reporting of these data and the recent marketing ROI to a real time task to hold your marketing transparent and all people involved accountable for the results.
With these activities you will be able to see from which marketing activities and sources you gain your best ROI and to improve your recent marketing tasks to increase your revenue.
Marketing takeaway tip: To measure your marketing ROI is the same thing as check a course of a ship at high seas. If you do not check your course in your business you will not be able to reach your goals on the long term. Stop relying on luck or your experience. It’s a real time world where things happen and change within minutes. There is a lot of technology out there to help you. Set yourself in the position to see your business in real time. This helps you to make decisions in real time as well. To know where your marketing budget is going and what you get out can make the difference between to overtake the 33% of your competition or to get left behind and lose the game!
As social media popularity is growing, the business opportunities for companies grow also. Social media has become a powerful communication channel for businesses to gain attraction, to educate their target audience, to offer support and service or simply to stay in touch with recent and future customers worldwide.
Companies which use social media as an additional way to communicate and to get seen from their targeted audience are increasingly experiencing positive results for their businesses. Moreover today technologies like HubSpotoffer a great way to visualize the development and ROI of social media and further lead generation ways.
In the mean time every serious business should have learned that social media is not a kids or college students thing. Moreover the most growing group on Facebook is in the age of 55+ years.
But students and other potential job candidates are active in social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and several other smaller networks and forums.
Smart companies have discovered that they can attract great employees through social media like they do it to attract new customers. They simply apply their social media marketing and communication tactics to fuel their human resource department with “Job applicant leads”!
To attract potential candidates to your business you need to be credible, authentic and trustworthy.
Most job candidates use social networks to research about potential employers before they submit a job application. The information they discover about a company online decide if they go to submit a job application!
Credible, authentic and trustworthy companies set them self into the position to gain the necessary credit to communicate to their audience of potential job candidates.
What should companies talk about on the web?
Companies should talk about things their audience of potential employees is interested about. But not about them self! You could use tips for applicants what they should take care off when they submit an application and to whom to speak directly to get a more inside view into the company.
How can a company sound more human to attract job candidates?
Being authentic and helpful and not to speak in corporate style is a great way to look more human. Also to introduce yourself in a more personal way, for example use an original picture can be very helpful.
How to showcase the human site of a company?
As above mentioned your business should introduce every person involved in the human resource process. This includes a short bio, a personal picture or even better personal short videos of the humans which work at the company. So they can get a better impression of the humans the maybe goes to work with.
How to use sociel media and blogging?
Social media gains more value for your business when you have something valuable, remarkable and share worthy to say. To start a corporate blog is a great way to publish valuable, remarkable and share worthy content on the web. Also a separate section of the blog can be used to communicate job related information to benefit ad to attract potential job candidates.
You could offer a separate blog to each of your recent employees where they can write about the things they are interested in like IBM does for their employees.
The more valuable, remarkable and share worthy content you companies publishes with the target audiences of potential job seekers in mind the more interested potential candidates you will attract to your job offers.
Your recent employees are great speaking tubes for vacant job positions in your company. You can tell them to communicate job offers through their networks in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and forums. This will spread your reach in an unexpected way.
Build local specialized discussion groups!
Another great way is to build elated discussion groups in social media. For example if you are an IT company and you need IT consultants for server security, you set a local (your city or state) related group about server security. So you would attract interested participants and if you need a server security expert for an open job you could reach out directly to the persons which are active in this group.
With this strategy you learn in advance about the potential candidate and the candidate about you. You have built a trustworthy relationship previously which increases your chances to get their attention when you need it!
How can you measure the success of your social media recruiting efforts?
This is the simplest part of your social media recruiting. You can do this by taking old numbers to by the hand, means what you have paid out to headhunters and job sites like Monster in the past. Then you have your old spending.
Now you take the new numbers by the hand, means what you have invested into your social media recruiting strategy. The head count cost, the corporate blog setup, content creation and so on.
As your applicants apply on special landing pages you can differentiate the various lead sources very easily.
So you can see how many came from your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, special social media groups you maintain and corporate blogging activities. How many application-leads and how many high quality candidates you get to choose from. Last but not leas how many of them you employed for your business.
How to deal with negative comments?
There are no negative comments only chances to step into conversation!
When you have done something wrong than confess it apologize and get back to business. Do not try to hide something. On the web things become public it’s only a question of time
When anybody says something what you don’t like jump into the conversation and explain your point of view.
The only things you do not need to answer to are insults and personal attacks. You can exclude rude people from your discussion and delete their comments. But all other discussion you need to take as a big chance for communication and to get seen from your target audience.
Marketing takeaway tip: Through right done social media recruiting you increase the quality of applicants. Also you should keep in mind that those activities will increase your brand recognition and how potential candidates view your company as an employer. These effects are priceless!
Further import resources about social media recruiting:
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When businesses are thinking of to get into Twitter, and set up a Facebook business page they often are afraid what people can say about them. Maybe they could complain and other will see this and they could lose business and reputation.
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