HOW TO PROMOTE A BUSINESS USING SOCIAL MEDIA ?

Wednesday 28 March 2012

Survey Says Marketers See Social Media as an Experiment

Would you say that social media is an accepted and necessary part of your marketing plan? Or is social media marketing still more of an experiment?

Pivot (the social business conference people) asked brand managers, agency professionals and marketing experts that question and the result was surprising.

49% said that social media marketing was still experimental. Of those people, 37% thought social media marketing would be mainstream by 2013, but 34.8% said they had no idea when they’d break on through.

The reason for the lag? Budget and lack of clear outcomes made the top of the list. Shortly below that, lack of clear social strategy and 39% said it was executive skepticism that kept them from settling in.

I know that return on investment is still the big question in social media marketing, but surely we’ve all come to the conclusion that it’s useful, even if we can’t measure it. Right?

If that’s not the case, then an awful lot of us are wasting a lot of time and energy and that’s a sobering thought.

On the other hand, 89% of respondents said that experimentation was just the nature of the beast. (They actually said “permanent fixture” but I like my image better.) This is probably true, since social keeps changing and morphing like nothing we’ve seen before.

Print and TV advertising haven’t changed much in the last fifty years, but who could have predicted Pinterest?

If we agree then, that social media marketing is still a grand experiment, the question is, is that okay? Are we comfortable with a medium that keeps shifting before we get a good grip? Or do you believe that social media will, eventually, become as routine as email and display advertising?

5 ADVANCED SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR SMALL BUSINESS...

Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing, but most don’t know what’s next.

What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

What Is An Advanced Strategy?

The definition of an advanced social strategy is a technique that goes beyond the normal social media presence. It introduces or reinforces a marketing message while pushing a user to another profile or business site. Before moving forward with an advanced strategy, it’s important that your business understands social marketing, has experience engaging consumers, and that you possess a basic understanding of online marketing.

Strategy 1: Multimedia Usage

The term “A picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer. Consumers are now using the web to look for product pictures and videos; they want more information and want to see what they’re considering buying. The good news is that it’s easy for a company to create and publish videos and pictures.

In addition to taking photos of products, you can also take pictures at office events as a way to highlight company culture. This not only helps convince others to work with you or to buy from you (consumers see that you are down to earth and one of them, instead of a stuffy company), it also helps your HR department recruit new employees. Who doesn’t want to work for a company that celebrates birthdays and has a good time?

Videos are useful for explaining complex how-tos or concepts. Showing step by step directions can have a greater impact than even the most well written article. Businesses don’t have to invest huge sums of money to create good videos, either. I highly recommend the relatively cheap Flip camcorder, which takes great videos and is easy for even a non-technical marketer to use.

Multimedia can break down the faceless business-to-consumer sales flow and make your company appear friendlier. Use videos and images to show that your business is fun, you care about your employees, and most importantly, that you care about your customers.

Example: WorldMusicSupply.com

WorldMusicSupply.com, an online retailer of musical instruments and accessories, has used YouTube to build a strong online community. Their channel has built over 7,000 subscribers and has over 260,000 views.

Strategy 2: Integrate Offline and Online Advertising

Many small businesses do some sort of offline advertising, whether it be radio, print, or cable. Social marketing allows a business to extend their offline sales pitch.

Including your Facebook Page or blog URL in offline ads act as social proof, inviting potential consumers to see your community and increase trust in your business. Not only can integrating online and offline advertising help the conversion process, but it can also help build your community. Introducing potential consumers to your social profiles means they may join your community now and buy later.

Strategy 3: Message Adaptation

As businesses start to become more sophisticated with social media they are starting to leverage more online platforms. However, most deliver the same message over multiple platforms instead of tailoring communications for each individual site.

Social platforms each have an ecosystem of their own. What might be acceptable on Tumblr might be considered spam on Facebook. A specific style of writing might spread on Twitter but fail on FriendFeed. Understanding that each site is different and then customizing your message ensures they do well on each respective site.

Not only does customizing messages across sites help the message spread but it keeps users from receiving multiple identical communications. Be sure to maximize your potential by sending a user that follows the business on Twitter and Facebook two different messages, instead of the same thing.

Strategy 4: Local Social Networks, Beyond Yelp

For a small business, local search can be a big win. Being visible to consumers looking for a business in their area is extremely important. Make sure your site is included in local business directories in order to help ensure that consumers find you when they need you. Sometimes finding that many sites can be difficult, however.

First, make sure you check your competitors. Where are they listed? Check their inbound links to check for business directories you can add yourself to. Also, make sure your business has been added to Google Maps, using the Local Business Center.

Take the time to include all the information you can and update any old news. For many consumers, this will be their first interaction with the business.

Example: Bella Napoli in New York

Bella Napoli is a small pizzeria in New York that has done a great job of making sure they appear in as many local searches as possible.

Strategy 5: Contests and Discounts

Building a community is only the first part of social marketing. Using that community to drive sales, propagate marketing, or crowdsource operations is the true power of social media. One way to excite the community is to collectively do something to create a contest or offer an exclusive discount (i.e., the contest can create competition between users). Not only does a contest build buzz organically but if contestants need to, for example, publish an article that gets the most comments in order to win, the contest itself becomes viral.

A good social media contest should include some sort of sharing or virality as a requirement for winning.

Discounts are also a great way to connect with your community. By giving exclusive coupons to your social community, you’re rewarding and reminding them that you are not only a brand to engage with, but also to buy from.

Example: NetFirms.com

NetFirms.com decided to make it easier to register a domain by allowing people to do it via Twitter. Those who participated or spread the word by tweeting, were also entered into a prize drawing.

Conclusion

Creating a basic social media presence is easy enough, getting your community to actually do something is more difficult. Taking advantage of these strategies can help you build your community, make your marketing more effective, and incentivize buying.

4 SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUE !!

Social media optimization refers to optimizing your websites and content in terms of sharing across social media and network sites. I’ve talked at length about the importance of social search and social proof; search engines are putting ranking progressively in the hands of its own users who themselves are users of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

The implication is that when information is shared or “liked”, say a blog post you’ve written, by someone on a social network like Facebook, that information/content is of quality. Google doesn’t have to rack its brain trying to make up its own mind about whether or not your blog post is quality or not because one of its own users gave your content a thumbs up themselves.

It’s more difficult to tip the scales or influence the search engines in this way, and consequently search engines like Google are putting more stock into social search which is why we need to make sure we’re effectively using social media optimization.

So how about effectively using social media optimization? Here are 4 social media optimization techniques to consider to make sure you are social media optimized:

Proof

Social proof encourages people to read your content, share it, and it significantly adds to your credibility. Check out this post on how to get Facebook likes which you can extend and apply to any other social network of choice.

Sharing

Make sure your content is easily shared. This is easy if people are on the social network, but if they’re on your site you should have some kind of system in place where you make it simple for people to share your content.

Logging In

As an example, people need to be logged in to Facebook before they can “Like” your content on your page. Make it possible for people to sign into Facebook from your website significantly increases the odds in which they’ll interact with you. Don’t assume that your entire audience is logged into every social network all of the time; so have that option available on your page.

Comments

You can turn your comments section into a more social Facebook comments section using the Simple Facebook Connect plugin. This encourages more comments because people can comment with their actual Facebook profiles. Their name and even their current FB picture appears right next to the comment and people can visit their profiles very easily.

The downside/tradeoff is that using an interface like Disquss or basic WordPress comments is SEO friendly and can help you rank whereas Facebook comments are unrecognized by search engines; so ultimately your site will not be nearly as SEO friendly in using Facebook Connect versus another system of comments. For a further explanation click on this link for Facebook comments in WordPress.

SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION TIPS !

The word “social media optimization” was first used and explained by Mr. Rohit Bhargava, who developed 5 guidelines for conducting social media optimization:

Increase your link-ability
Make tagging and bookmarking easy
Reward inbound links
Help your content travel
Encourage the mashup

The list of rules was rapidly carried on by the other bloggers despite the fact that several writers confused social media optimization phenomenon with social media marketing. Other SMO rules include:

Encourage creation of user-generated content
Allow users to evaluate, modify and organize articles
Let users get in touch on your site.

To complete these tasks you can use the below methods:

Add share-me buttons connected to bookmarking sites, social news sites, social event sites and other social media channels.
Incorporate linking tactics that help users link to your website, link out of your website and cross link within your site.
Develop custom applications to help visitors of your site connect with each other, share ideas and communicate.
Allow users to rank, rate, and organize your content, this is also another good practice.
Integrate icons from third-party social media sites using APIs.
Add RSS feeds to your site to make your content sharing easier.

SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION

Social media optimization (also known as SMO or social SEO) is the methodization of social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content. SMO is one of many online methods of website optimization. One of the many other methods is search engine optimization or SEO.

There are two types of social media optimization methods:

Social media features added to the content itself, including: RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos
Promotional activities in social media aside from the content being promoted, including: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles

Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.

Social media optimization is considered an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence.

Social media consultants often run comprehensive online campaigns, including blogger engagement, hyper-localized marketing, and/or search engine optimization (SEO).

Social media optimization is not limited to marketing and brand building. Increasingly, smart businesses are integrating social media participation as part of their knowledge management strategy (i.e., product/service development, recruiting, employee engagement and turnover, brand building, customer satisfaction and relations, business development and more). Additionally, social media optimization can be implemented to foster a community of the associated site, allowing for a healthy business-to-consumer (B2C) relationship.

Monday 26 March 2012

HOW TO PROMOTE A BUSINESS USING SOCIAL MEDIA ?

Using the web to create an effective online person for your business is a low cost marketing tools, and there is no better way to promote your business than using social media. Apply these simple , yet effective method of social media optimization (SMO) to start increasing visibility for your business

Join appropriate social media network. Pick your social media outlets wisely. An entertainment copywriter can connect with other writer and potential music and film clients on Myspace & Facebook. A chiropractor looking to expand his clients roster is better suited to promote his business on Twitter and LinkedIn. Think about your target market and where the group gathers on the Internet, before joining an online community.

Create a social media bio. Here is your chance to craft a short message highlighting your service and products. Use this opportunity to positive your company as an emerging market loader. Most social networking sites encourage users to create a biography. Write a two paragraph bio that effectively summarize your company summarize your company mission & product or service offering.

Become an active member of the social community. Include a friendly welcome message to your social media pages to encourage other members to interact with your page. Introduce yourself to other community members Invite others users to become friends.

Help others, suggest interesting websites, articles and information that will add value to the online conversation, LinkedIn for example has area where you can answer other users question or suggest or suggest question to be answered by the community of experts. Add value to the online community. Comment frequently on popular blogs and within social networking.

Drive traffic to your website. Build inbound links to your other websites as a member of the social media community. Read each social networks rules carefully. Don't just drop self serving links without investigating the sites policies. Community users do not tolerate spammers Yahoo ! Answer and wiki answers will quickly ban users who abuse their commenting rules.

Promote your products and services to a captive audience create a subgroup within the community who have similar goals and interest as your company. Post notice once a month advertising your business to member who have expressed interest in leaning more about your company.