social media marketing | inBlurbs Inbound Marketing Agency

July 16, 2011March 24, 2014

Make the Most of Social Media Marketing

There is no doubt about it; social media is here to stay. While the thought of venturing in into the realm of social media can be intimidating, the thing to remember is to start small, start with a purpose, and work to grow your social media marketing strategy over time.

The Facts

The trajectory of social networking continues to rise and gain momentum.

In fact, in 2010, 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users visited a social networking site each month and in 2010 social networking sites accounted for 12 percent of all time spent online, with an average Internet user spending more than 4.5 hours on these sites each month.

Social networking has become ingrained in our lives and is quickly becoming the preferred form of communication for countless individuals.

Facebook, the social networking behemoth, accounted for 10 percent of U.S. page views in 2010, and three out of every ten Internet sessions included a visit to this site.

(2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review: A Recap of the Year in Digital Media)

Why Use Social Media?

Aside from the fact that these sites are widely popular, they do provide numerous benefits to companies and organizations that are willing to invest in this type of marketing strategy.

These sites can assist in recruiting new employees, helping to establish trust with customers, working to build positive word of mouth buzz and establishing your company as an authority in your field of business. They can also assist with garnering research on your customers and testing out new product ideas.

Internally, they can also increase employee communication and feedback, assist with business process improvements and work to streamline project management efforts.

Where to Begin

As stated earlier, start small, but start smart.

Determine which sites to target

Figure out which sites your current and potential clients are visiting and focus on utilizing those for your social media efforts. Also assess what your competition is doing and don’t be afraid to review the efforts of large, successful companies. You can often glean tips and tricks to utilize on a smaller scale.

Establish goals and set metrics

Are you trying to raise brand awareness, sell more products, build relationships, position yourself as a thought leader, or all of the above? It is extremely important to evaluate how successful your strategy is. Measure how much your social media sites are being utilized and survey customers about their knowledge of them.

Align your tone and messaging

Since your vehicle for communication is changing, you also have to consider how you should change the tone of your messaging. Social media is much more casual than traditional marketing and it is also much more indirect.

Become a thought leader

Individuals see right through a campaign that is all about you and your business, instead, focus on sharing how your products and services can make the lives of your customers better and easier.

Don’t be afraid to share information that isn’t specifically about your company. Sharing valuable information establishes trust with your customer base; it shows them that you care about their success.

Make the time commitment and be timely

Social media is about starting and maintaining a conversation. You need to be active in order for social media to benefit your business. Set aside time each day to review what people are saying and to partake in the conversation.

Integrate your social media strategies with each other and with your traditional marketing plans

Ensure your messaging and branding remains consist. The last thing you want to do is jeopardize, weaken or dilute your brand.

In Conclusion

Take a deep breath and jump right in because you have to start somewhere. As long as your content is valuable, you will see that people are interested in what you have to say.

Author Profile

Keith Barrett is a leading search engine optimization expert, with specific interest in social media marketing. His company, Search South, offers small business SEO services, as well as a wider range of approaches for businesses of all sizes.

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July 6, 2011October 7, 2011

Facebook Video Calling for Real Time marketing with social media

With its new Video Calling feature powered by Skype Facebook opens another opportunity for companies to do marketing with social media.

With Facebook Video Calling businesses have the opportunity to meet their customers face to face in real time and to chat and to interact with them instantly!

Sales and customer support can profit greatly from this feature as sales can interact directly and personally with a potential customer no matter where on the planet this potential customer is located.

For support we have a good situation as well as the support staff can show a personal and human company picture when they chat directly on Facebook to their customer to help them to solve their problems.

Yes, sure there are GTalk and Skype, but when your audience is on Facebook at this moment when they want to buy, have a question or need your help to solve a problem than you can catch this opportunity of the Facebook Video Calling feature to get in touch with them instantly!

How do you go to use the Facebook Video Calling feature to interact with your target audience on Facebook is up on you!

Further important sources:

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July 5, 2011October 7, 2011

6 Facebook Page Business Advantages to support your social media marketing strategies

Facebook has surpassed Google with search requests and is now the most trafficked site on the web. With its 700+ million users, Facebook is reaching a worldwide audience.

A study conducted with 180 businesses discovered that 67% of the B2C and 41% of the B2B companies have been able to win new customers through Facebook.

Businesses which have serious social media marketing strategies in place have connected to social network sites like Facebook and experienced the similar growth as those social networking sites.

There about 3 million Facebook pages of local businesses online and this number increases daily. Because these pages are free and can bring tremendous value when you add them to your social media marketing strategies to get in touch with your audience on Facebook. You can utilize Facebook for your business and profit from it.

Here are 6 advantages to be on Facebook:

1st Advantage to be on Facebook, Visibility: You can increase your visibility. As your network grows there also your reach grows. The more people you are connected with the more your visibility for your business will increase and the chances to attract new customers.

2nd Advantage to be on Facebook, Share ability: When you publish valuable and share worthy content on Facebook the chances are good that your network will share it to their friends. With this share ability of content more people become aware of your business and maybe connect with you on Facebook and visit your website to see what you have to offer.

3rd Advantage to be on Facebook, Branding: The more people get to know you, the more your brand will spread on Facebook and on the web as well. To become a visible brand is important to gain attention and to get the chance to start a conversation with potential customers.

4th Advantage to be on Facebook, Trust and Authority: You can’t buy trust and authority you have to earn it in a long trust building process. Your audience will only listen to you when they think you are trustworthy. When your audience decides you are trustworthy, than your communication get weight and your audience will listen to it and share it with their connections.

5th Advantage to be on Facebook, Connection: Social networking is all about building connections to people with the same interest. An average Facebook user has about 130 connections. The more relevant connections you can build the better. But keep in mind that this does not happen overnight! To build relevant connection takes work and time.

6th Advantage to be on Facebook, SEO: As the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing indexing social media content and give it out in search requests, your communication could also be on such a search result and make you known with people who didn’t new you before!

How do you utilize Facebook fan pages for your marketing? I am looking forward to your comments below in the comment field.

Here are further important resources for the topic Facebook Fan Pages:

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July 4, 2011October 7, 2011

5 Easy ways to get ROI of your social media marketing campaign

When you are engaged in social media conversation than this can be very beneficial for your business.

Real time engagement can help you to facilitate your customer service, improve your public relation and your brand.

Participating in social media can have a number of beneficial business applications such as facilitating customer service and boosting public relations.

Your engagement in social media should also reflect results for your revenue. Revenue this is your main goal to take all the efforts and investments.

How about your social media marketing? Do you get revenue out from your social media marketing and how do you measure this. What are your most important social media marketing channels and how many leads they generate and how do those leads convert. What’s your social media ROI?

Here are the Top 5 social media ROI metrics you can track easily:

1. Your Social Media Reach: Measure your Facebook fans, Twitter followers and LinkedIn Connections. The more people you have in your network the wider your message will spread. Track how your reach is increasing and also try to indentify influencers in your friend’s network and connect to them as well. Expand your reach. The more qualified people the more your reach will increase.

2. Your Website Traffic: The main reason why you do social media marketing ist to increase your website or blog traffic. Measure how many visitors come from social media websites. The more your social media reach increases the more your website and blog traffic will increase as well.

3. Your Business Leads: The lead amount and quality are your most important measures of your social media marketing ROI. Track how many leads come from each social media source and improve your doings on those social media sites to get the most out.

4. Your New Customers: Research how many of your social media business leads are converting to paying customers and from which sources the come. This gives you another important measure to tweak your social media marketing.

5. The Conversion Rate: What’s your website visitor to business lead conversion rate? What share of your traffic from social media websites becomes lead on your website or blog? This is an indicator which of your activities or website converts better and which one you could improve to increase the channel ROI.

Marketing Takeaway Tip: To track and to measure is an important part of social media marketing success. With these metrics above you are able to track and to measure your social media marketing. You are able to show clear numbers and ROI. This helps you to improve your doings and your revenue!

How about your social media marketing ROI? I am looking forward to your comments here below in the comments field.

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June 28, 2011October 7, 2011

Location based marketing social media to get in front of your audience

Location based marketing integrates mobile advertising with different mobile technologies.

Location based marketing is used to pinpoint consumer’s location and provide location specific information, to attract customers to products and services, on their mobile devices. Location based marketing is going to out beat other types of traditional advertising as the mode of delivering the advertisements is a mobile device which is ubiquitous.

As location based services use mobile devices to share location and your doing with your network, they get more info and improve your experiences.

Studies show that people who use location based services are:

— 80% male
— 70% 19-35 yrs. Old
— 70% college grads
— 38% considered influential
— 20% more likely to do mobile research

The motivation to use location based services are to find friends, play games, get coupons and share their activity and increase loyalty. Further motivations are to find hidden offers, discover points of interest, get new experiences and find new products and services.

Two profitable reasons why you as a marketer should use location based marketing for your business:

— Location based services users will increase from today’s 96 million users by 2012 to 526 million users.
— Of all Smart Phone users about 10% are on location based services. About 63% of all IPhone users are on location based services minimum once a week.

Here are five location based services which you should utilize for your marketing:

Gowalla

Goby

The Dealmap

Yelp

Foursquare

Is your business location based services and marketing ready?

— Is your website optimized for mobile?
— Do you have planned to do a mobile app which complements your business with location based services?

On the end the products seek us based on our activities and location. The question is will it be your products or the products of your competitor which will find the new customer?

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June 27, 2011October 7, 2011

How companies are using social media for marketing research

How to do social media for marketing research? In fact this is the first part of a social media marketing strategy.

First, it is important to learn more about your customer and the social media places they are hanging around and why they are there, what they are interested and what they are talking about.

When you have done your previous social media for marketing research right, than you have discovered your different buyer personas and how to get their attention to attract them to your offers.

Now you can digg deeper and discover your competition and what they are doing in social media. You could take a closer look at your competitors and see if they are successful with their marketing. What their customers are saying about them and much more.

You could also focus on trends in your industry. This gives you the opportunity to offer custom tailored products and services to your target audience to server there demand better.

Here are some tips how you can use social media for your research:

Learn more about your target audience on Facebook!

To learn more about your potential marketing on Facebook you can use some FB tools like FB Groups, Pages and FB Ads.

Facebook Groups: In Groups you can get the real time communication of your target audience. You can see which things they are interested in and what the like and do not like. You should become a member of the most groups which are important to reach your audience.

Facebook Pages: The same opportunity here with company pages. Look out for company pages of your competition and “Like” them. So you can observe the discussions on your competitors pages and gain important information on what they are doing and customer satisfaction.

Facebook Ads: With Facebook Ads you can do segmentation for your audience. The segmentation shows you how many people of your target audience are on Facebook. This numbers gives you a more inside look into the marketing potential and possible success of your Facebook marketing.

Learn more about your target audience on LinkedIn!

LinkedIn is great especially for B2B marketing. With its 100+ million users they are not as big as Facebook, but for B2B they are the number one player in the marketing.

You can learn more about your potential marketing success on LinkedIn when you utilize some LinkedIn tools like Groups, Answers and LinkedIn Ads.

LinkedIn Groups: Research for In Groups LinkedIn where your buyer personas could be around. Become a member of these groups and observe the discussions and communication there. Introduce yourself and your business and offer help and assistance. Comment if you have something important to contribute. Groups are great way to get seen from your target audience.

LinkedIn Answers: On LinkedIn you can showcase your knowledge. Research for your industry related keywords and phrases and give advice to the people who have asked. Listen carefully to the questions asked, because this is what your audience is interested in. You can get a lot of information for product and marketing improvement from LinkedIn Answers.

LinkedIn Ads: As Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads give you a more clear picture and numbers about your audience and market potential on LinkedIn. The segmentation LinkedIn shows you how many people of your target audience are registered from how many countries. Equipped with this numbers you can increase your chances on LinkedIn.

Learn more about your target audience on Twitter!

With its 100+ million users Twitter is the biggest micro blogging platform online. Most major businesses utilize Twitter for their customer support and interaction.

With its feature like @Mentions, Retweets, Searches and Lists you are able not only to see what your audience is talking about you, moreover you can set more of your industry related keywords and phrases to see trends and important discussion and also you can observe your competitors through Twitter.

These tips show you how to using social media for marketing research in an easy and smart way.

Monitor your social media in less than 10 minutes a day

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June 23, 2011October 8, 2011

LinkedIn endorsement and follower count to get the most clicks for your paid advertisements

As you maybe have heard LinkedIn has launched a Personalized Ad Platform, which makes ads more attractive. These improvements doe really benefit marketers.

About LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site and is mainly used for professional networking. As of 22 March 2011, LinkedIn reports more than 100 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Turkish. Quantcast reports LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally.

–Source Wikipedia

There is no question, if you want to reach your B2B audience than LinkedIn is your first choice.

With the launched a Personalized Ad Platform LinkedIn shows your potential visitors the endorsements you have get. This could help to improve your credibility and increase the number of qualified clicks to your ads and the number of business leads generated as well.

The new launched a Personalized Ad Platform of LinkedIn empowers your PR value. As PR coverage is more valuable then paid advertising only, the included information about your endorsements from third parties and your followers cout are more valuable and increase your credibilityt too.

The follower count which is shown on the Personalized Ads also which also weights good when you are looking to attract prospects to your pages to generate business leads.

When you are able to manage your LinkedIn interaction, to grow your followers and get endorsements than you are on a good track. Also you should manage the conversation on LinkedIn because this is the venue of all of the above and supercharges your paid advertisement on LinkedIn results! 😉

Marketing takeaway tip: Step one; grow your LinkedIn followers and get as much endorsement as you can. Step two; start to do marketing with the LinkedIn Personalized Ad Platform.

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June 22, 2011October 8, 2011

Inbound Marketing with or without marketing strategy to reach business leads goals

A strategy is a great way to have some kind of roadmap which can guide you through the opportunities and pitfalls of internet marketing.

To achieve your marketing and revenue goals you need to know which way to go and what exactly to do when you establish an internet marketing strategy.

In today times when things are changing in real-time, even not over night anymore you also should keep a certain level of flexibility to adjust your marketing tasks and correct your course if necessary to reach your internet marketing and revenue generation goals.

As social media and content creation are important parts of inbound marketing you need to keep the flexibility to react on your customers demand. To simply stay on a previous decided way without taking into account that things can change or have changed could lead your marketing efforts in the wrong direction!

How to have a flexible strategy?

Set an editorial Kalender, where you write your content ideas down, where you plan your events and press release distribution. But do not obsess about it.

As content creation is the backbone of inbound marketing you maybe should establish your marketing as some kind of content marketing! Why content marketing?

Go through your social media channels and listen to the conversation. Listen what kind of questions your audience have and what kind of problems they are looking to get solved. Here you will get your content inspiration in real-time. When you carefully listen you can be helpful and contribute in real-time to your audience and make them aware of you.

Also you can use this Q&A as resources to write a blog post, eBook, whitepaper or a simple how-to, to solve the problems of your audience in real-time!

When you produce interesting, helpful and remarkable content you should market this content through appropriate social media channels to get it noticed by your audience, in real-time.

Marketing takeaway tip: Solve the problems that bother your audience in real-time as they appear. This will set you apart from your competition, make you outstanding and will attract more curious potential new clients to your offers.

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June 15, 2011October 8, 2011

Speed up your SEO with Social Media

How to get on first page of Google? This is the most asked question when it comes to SEO.

The question should be: How to get found from potential customers?

Do you know which keywords, terms and phrases your target audience is looking for when they do research for products and services from your industry?

A lot of traffic does not mean anything, when you don’t generate high quality leads.

Less is more!

Balzac

Businesses often focus on a “large amount of traffic” instead of the “right traffic”. This results in enormous PPC spending and Keywords acquisition battles with companies with deeper pockets which simply displace you with their massive financial power.

When businesses do SEO than often results are expected over night. But this is not the case. Sustainable results in SEO need time.

Go “Long Tail” and do research for two or three words keywords. A great help to do this is the Google Keywords Tool. Your area of interest depends if your globally active or locally.

If you are locally active lookout for the keywords with a low competition and under 1000 local searches. Mark all of them and export them to your desktop. Be precise with your keywords as you can be, this will increase the quality of your traffic and your leads.

Now you can produce content around your researched keywords. Publish this content in a corporate blog and distribute and market it on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and so on.

Search engines love blogs. Blogs have always fresh and newsworthy content and therefore they prefer to index them. A regularly updated blog gets more search engine attention than a website.

Each published article is an additional chance to get found on Google from your target audience.

Encourage your friends and followers to give you feedback, comments and critics about your content. Encourage them to share your content with their network of friends.

The information distributed and discussed in social media is also indexed from search engines and the more you are active the more your chances increase to get found in search engine results. Social media is called the new SEO.

Read also these articles:

Leverage your employees to quadruple your business leads
Why numbers count for Facebook lead generation success
How to get found on Google? This is easier than you think.

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June 6, 2011October 8, 2011

How to measure your ROI of Public Relations

When you are doing social media and public relations you will come to the question how to measure your results, moreover how to identify any ROI of your PR activities?

To track your PR results, your reach and mentions is essential for the improvement of your strategy.

The more information you get the better you can improve and optimize your tasks to increase your results.

There is no exact way to calculate the ROI of social media and PR.

Here are some points you can utilize to come very close to facts and data to calculate your ROI:

Google Alerts: You can track mentions of your company in media. You can set alerts for your brand, your name and your products. Google alerts can immediately inform you as soon your brand, your name and your products is mentioned online. You can also track what your competition is doing this way.

Track Your Press Releases: You can do this very well on Google Search “News”, “Blogs”, “Real-time” and Discussions. Here you can also set Google Alerts.

Your Website’s Sources: When you learn more if your traffic is coming from your press releases and from social media like Facebook and Twitter you get clear info how people find you.

Ask Your Customers How They Found You: A great way to measure your reach is to ask your customers how they found you. You can do this in a very simple way by adding an extra form field to your landing pages.

This above are only some ways to measure and to bring great data together, there is much more. But start with the above and evolve your doings to measure the ROI of your PR.

How do you measure your PR reach? I am looking forward to your comments below.

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The Facts

Why Use Social Media?

Where to Begin

Determine which sites to target

Establish goals and set metrics

Align your tone and messaging

Become a thought leader

Make the time commitment and be timely

In Conclusion

Free eBook: 9 Easy Steps to Facebook Succes

Here are 6 advantages to be on Facebook:

Here are the Top 5 social media ROI metrics you can track easily:

Two profitable reasons why you as a marketer should use location based marketing for your business:

Here are five location based services which you should utilize for your marketing:

Here are some tips how you can use social media for your research:

There is no question, if you want to reach your B2B audience than LinkedIn is your first choice.

Less is more!

Balzac

Here are some Tipps how you can improve your social media sharing ratio:

Here are some points you can utilize to come very close to facts and data to calculate your ROI: