Archive for Web2.0
Why Small Business Can Use Social Media?
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This article is by our team member, Eleanor Marks Prior:
No business man would stop thinking about great innovations for their business. Whether you are in a small business or a big one, you are looking for advice on how to make more profits, or you’ve never stopped researching how other successful businesses are taking advantage of their success. We could never deny that the new online marketing techniques have a great role. There has been a lot of craze and hype in the media recently about the impact of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. While some of it is overstated much of what is going on could be called a revolution in the way people do business around the world.
Many people are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, for example, and are opening up accounts, but few have any real idea of what to do once they get into the Twitter world–and the same with Facebook. Especially when it comes to business many business owners simply get an online presence and hope for the best. Even fewer take any real advantage of YouTube as a free advertising vehicle, or even know about what article marketing is.
All these social media sites can help you drive masses of traffic to your website. This is much like people coming in off the street in a busy business district to browse in your store. Once they are in the door the chances that they will buy something are pretty good. The same thing can be done to attract people to your small business online. You just have to learn the ways of the social media and social networking world.
Many small business owners think social media is only useful for large brands, like Dell or Southwest Airlines. The truth is any small business that effectively invests time in social media marketing can improve customer loyalty and increase the best kind of marketing there is: word of mouth.
Social media makes businesses more accessible and personable to customers and potential customers. It enables small businesses to maintain long term relationships and connections, increase referrals and increase trust. Used correctly, social media is extremely powerful for establishing and growing an online reputation.
What the BLOG???
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I just read this great article in Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero’s Ezine, Copywriting TNT. As a graduate of Lorrie’s Shefactor Bootcamp I’m a great fan of hers and wanted to share this post with you:
Blogs Are the NEW Secret Weapon for Reaching Your Tarket. Just like you, I hate being marketed to. Every day we’re bombarded with over 3,500 marketing messages. And frankly I’m sick of it! But blogs are different. Blogs are a two-way conversation between blogger and bloggee (plus all the readers in between). Through commenting and cross-linking, you can share feedback. You can build your network. You can become, dare I say it, an Internet celebrity!
See, blogs add humanity and instantaneous expression to the web. Like ezines, blogs are a way for your customer to get to know you.
However, unlike ezines, blogs help you with search engine rankings. Did you hear me? I said, unlike ezines, blogs help you with search engine rankings. That’s a big one.
Entrepreneur Magazine, Business Week, even the FCC (Federal Trade Commission) all believe blogs are here to stay. Recently Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, started one. His initial post drew over 30,000 readers. A Microsoft spokesperson says Bill Gates is considering starting a blog. And filmmaker Michael Moore built a blog to promote his controversial movie, Fahrenheit 9/11.
But who has time to read a blog anyway? Exactly! The job of a blog is to cut through the information overload and deliver searchable, relevant and current content. BlogAds.com recently conducted a survey of over 17,000 blog readers. Here’s what they report:
- Blog readers are older and more affluent. 61% of blog readers are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year.
- Blog readers are more cyber-active. 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers.
- Blog readers are media-mavens. 21% subscribe to the New Yorker magazine, 15% to the Economist, 15% to Newsweek and 14% to the Atlantic Monthly.
- Whether on the left or right, blog readers have traits in common that often are absent in today’s public spaces: passion and initiative.
- Blog readers have apathy towards traditional news sources. 82% say that television is worthless. 55% percent say the same about print newspapers. 54% say the same about print magazines.
- Meanwhile, 86% say that blogs are either useful or extremely useful as sources of news or opinion. 80% say they read blogs for news they can’t find elsewhere. 78% read because the perspective is better. 66% value the faster news. 61% say that blogs are more honest.
- Blog readers appear united in their dissatisfaction with conventional media and their rabid love of blogs.
Don’t you want to be a blogger too? How about looking at some samples of the good, the bad and the bizarre?
Model citizen blogs: http://www.marketingsecrets.com/blog/ – John Reese’s blog. Hey, the guy just made $1,080,496.37 online in a single day. Here’s a good rule of thumb. If Reese is doing it, you should be too.
http://www.talkbiz.net/ramblings/weblog.php – Copywriter Paul Myers keeps us up-to-date on SPAM and other Internet marketing nightmares.
http://www.bookedsolidu.com – Michael Port’s new streamlined and simplified community helps you get booked solid. His old site, Booked Solid Referral Network, was just too big. This one is amazing! You’ll love it.
My Blog: http://www.redhotblogging.com – my blog today.
Bizarro Blog: Jeff Bridges’ site is considered a “blog.” He uses “hand-written” graphics that make it a unique and clever site! (Yes, really.) http://www.jeffbridges.com
I dipped my toe into the blogging pool a few years ago. Now I’ve decided it’s time to really learn how to do this stuff with an expert who will take me by the hand through the scary forest of the blog-world. I’m going back to school!
Christina Hills has opened another world to me using WordPress. I just attended her amazing, content-filled “Website Creation Workshop” studying her detailed webinars. Even though I have my own Blog, I’ve learned a ton since meeting this bright and intelligent guru woman!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Award-winning marketer, world-renowned copywriter and creator of “The She Factor®“, Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero of Red Hot Copy has a reputation as the top female copywriter in the info-marketing industry. She has written award-winning home study courses, conducts a world-famous virtual copywriting training, holds live workshops, and is authoring the original book, The She Factor based on her own She Factor Marketing System. Lorrie is dedicated to teaching the world it is possible to shift from the hype-filled sales to a more modern version…marketing written with authenticity, trust, and rapport. Check out Lorrie’s websites: http://www.redhotcopy.com and http://www.redhotcopy.com/shefactorbootcamp1.html and http://www.redhotblogging.com.
Fan Pages on Facebook
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Eleanor Marks Prior writes about Fan Pages on Facebook:
Fan Pages on Facebook can be very beneficial to any website or company. According to “Mashable.com”, post’s growth figures of roughly 20% monthly, totalling a 200% in size annually. This would mean that this is a good place to build good networks, making a name and endorsing your services and products. And the process is easy, simple and free. In fact,
you can really become a fan of anything, whether it’s for someone famous or you may become a fan to something that you find interesting. Whenever you update fan pages, all of your fans see what’s new and they may comment, or they may engage in conversations, ask questions, and visit your website all at one central place. These features give any businesses a great advantage, it may be a small or a big time company, products or websites.
Advantages of Fan Page on Facebook?
- Search engines can index the page.
- Pages are public, you can get some nice facebook.com link credit for free.
- You can send “updates” to fans whenever you want. This is one of the greatest features It’s a nice way of building a database of interested users. You may send messages about new products, updated website, etc.
- You control the page especially from those competitors who would like to use your page. You are able to send messages, edit or remove sections, and control the information to an extent. You can also easily invite your target audience to your page. Facebook makes it easier to distinguish who exactly is in your target demographic.
- When someone joins your Fan page, It publishes on their News feed “Jane Doe became a fan of”. This gives you a chance to connect to more people from other networks.
- With your fan page, You establish a strong fan base during these initial stages of Facebooks growth and more importantly the development stages of Facebooks attempt to monetize their efforts, will provide you with a solid standpoint to operate from in the years to come.
- This lets you see exactly where your fans are coming from, their age, there language and so on. You can monitor the growth of your site and see exactly how many page hits your page is getting It’s safe to be said this is still really in the beta stages of production and in the nearby future there will be many more options that will help your develop your marketing strategies and advertising campaigns.
Your Facebook fan page is an extension of your brand and must reflect that. Remember that people are spending more and more of their time online today. Many businesses create their fan pages with great branding and content; but if you do not make any effort to connect and engage the fans, this may be gone to waste. It is really important that you give importance.
All of these will work well if you have a main goal or purpose to your fan page that keeps you focused. It will be easier to decide what to include as content on your fan page if you have set goals in place.
Want a Facebook fanpage now. Can’t do it? No time? Not getting the results from the venture that you wanted? Contact me for evident fan page success.
22 tweets a day? Are you serious?
Posted by: | CommentsLooking at this interesting article http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4594/Is-22-Tweets-Per-Day-the-Optimum.aspx it appears that posting about 22 Twitter messages daily is the figure to aim for if you are a serious Twitter user. Some people even send 150 tweets out daily. Where do they get the time from to do that? And what are they tweeting about?
If you are anything like me you probably don’t do that. I’m glad to have the time to post one (!) per day, so I’m a bit more like Barack Obama who posts 0.38 tweets daily.
The NY Times sends around 39.04 updates out daily, but I understand that, of course. They’d have a lot of things to post about and there are always fresh news in the pipeline. I guess if I was the NY Times I’d probably post even more! But then no one would buy their newspaper, so cancel that idea.
Over the past few days I’ve made an effort to tweet more often. The only thing I’m concerned about is the quality of posts. I don’t think a post saying “I’m having a sandwich” is great for networking. If you post a lot describing your daily life, starting from “walking the dog” to “giving the dog dinner” and “brushing the dog”, lots of people will take you off their list. Or maybe they enjoy perving into the intimate details of your dog’s life and help you count the flees he’s battling.
So what on earth do you post about when you need to send 22 messages into the Twitter realm? After all, you are looking at brand building, making a connection with potential clients and joint venture partners, driving traffic to your website or blog or trying to sell your services and products.
But be aware: a lot of Twitter fans don’t want to hear your sales talk anyway! I have to admit that I won’t follow people who post only one update about their “great” product, follow thousands of people and expect you to follow them. No way!
Then the others I don’t like are the people who have their sales pitch in every tweet they post. So boring! Actually, I prefer the “making a sandwich and cleaning the benchtop” crowd over the sales people who can’t even relax on the toilet without thinking about selling something to you.
How about you? What do you do? Do you send 22 tweets a day (sounds like 5+ a day, a New Zealand campaign about eating more veggies) into Twitter heaven? What do you say in all these posts? Where do you find all the content to post great information?
Social Media Marketing Certification
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I have something to celebrate! After attending the Social Media Marketing programme with VA Classroom, I’ve gained certification as a Social Media Marketing Consultant.
I decided to study Social Media Marketing more closely as I believe that for a large amount of small businesses social media marketing is a vital tool to get free exposure to virtually millions of potential customers.
With Social Media you are able to dominate your niche without spending a fortune on marketing, all it costs is time and your knowledge (or the time of the VA you may hire to help you out with the Social Media tasks if you are too busy).
Social Media Marketing is also exciting because you can prequalify your customers. You build a relationship before any services or products are exchanged and this relationship often turn into longterm business relationships and further sales. The customers get to know you, like you and trust you. This is important to be able to move your customers through your marketing funnel. Without trust people are often to shy to take up on your offers.
Social Media can take this shyness away because your potential customers already value your opinions, your knowledge and your ability to solve their problems. By participating in Social Media you are able to post little gems of your knowledge and advice on certain topics without giving it all away for free. Your participation makes potential customers realise that they NEED your advice and your products.
The seven modules of the programme covered:
- Social Media and Strategy and Action Planning
- Social Network Profile Set-up and Management
- Twitter Marketing
- Facebook Marketing
- Online Video Marketing
- Online Reputation Management
- Social Media Content Marketing
If you are keen to learn about these exciting topics yourself, you can enrol in this interactive programme yourself.
The course is self-directed and can be done from home and you can decide when you choose to study and for how long. It is taught by video with detailed resource guides and extensive links and information. Additionally, you become a member of a very active Social Media Club Forum that can be used by all members to exchange ideas, post questions and get further advice.
This course is particularly interesting for:
- Virtual Assistants who want to offer these services to their clients,
- Public Relations and Marketing professionals who haven’t been exposed to Social Media yet, but know they need it for their career
- Entrepreneurs who want to be able to create their own successful social media campaigns by themselves and need more in-depth training.
I’ll go and celebrate now! You’ll hear again from me soon! 
Cheers,
Heike
“Your social media journey starts here”
Posted by: | CommentsJust a quick link to a member of LinkedIn, Pam Broviac, who kindly posted a very interesting document on the forum. You can find the thread here: http://tinyurl.com/8cdure. It is highly recommended when you, or someone you know, needs to know the basics about social media.
As for me, I’m just closing the suitcase and hope everything will fit in and I won’t forget anything essential, such as my fifth pair of high heels or the mascara. 
We’re off to the Gold Coast/Australia for a relaxing week with the kids.
I haven’t been there before, so am curious. I usually prefer going to more non-touristic areas, but those areas are often not much fun for kids who don’t like reading about ancient history or staring at cave drawings. So this time, I’ll do something outside my comfort zone and head right into the touristic tumult with its oversaturated beaches with shopping centres and racehorse tracks abound.
I’ll take the laptop, but who knows if there’s time to squeaze in to go online.
I hope everybody is enjoying New Zealand’s glorious sunshine! See you all again in a bit over one week.
Facebook versus Twitter
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I have to admit that I’ve only recently started subscribing to Twitip.com, but I really love it! For every Twitter user there is lots of relevant information and discussion.
Today they discuss which one of the two giants in the social media world are the best and will be the most significant eventually after the first hype goes off: Twitter or Facebook.
I use both and as the Twitip blog says, they are very different. For me Facebook is a great tool to connect with people I actually don’t really know, like business connections. I have only a few real life friends on Facebook because not many of them actually use it. This is probably due to the fact that I’m from New Zealand and it looks like the Internet is yet not dominated by New Zealand websurfers. Consequently, I use my Facebook profile as a business and networking tool.
What fascinates me is the way you “get to know” someone on Facebook. Although I don’t know most of my connections/friends on Facebook, I feel I know them, especially the active ones. You see their family photos, they discussions, you read their words of encouragement, their feelings when things are a bit harder, etc. It’s amazing to be able to learn so much about strangers and feel connected to them.
Wwhat I value about Facebook: the connectedness and the kind of conversations you can lead with others. You are able to see parts of their work, their interests and networks, so you are actually able to connect better, which in return may lead to strategic alliances at some stage. I bet Facebook helped a lot of businesses to connect and I’m sure that many people bought business packages, like coaching and training, from some of their Facebook networks, so for these providers Facebook will be quite a lucrative option.
The Facebook business pages are a great idea, but many business pages seem to be deserted. Someone set them up at some stage, but then never bothered again to update them. This is very counterproductive, of course, so why bother even setting up a page if you don’t ever care to update them?
Twitter is more anonymous than Facebook at first glance. You can just sit there and watch. And you can actually stay in this position for hours without needing to do anything. You have a larger number of contacts and only a few are very familiar. Due to the nature of the tool, you often get either trivial posts, like “off to bed now” or links to other sites. This is good and bad. You see the “human” side of the industry leaders you follow and admire, and still you never really seem to get connected as no longer conversation can take place on Twitter.
You can learn a lot from reading a few posts of some of the well known social media celebrities (including famous bloggers) and you feel part of their life because you read some snippets of what they are doing right that minute you read their tweet. But often you experience being left out of the conversation because there are so many people you don’t know and don’t recognise. And they all seem to be in conversations with each other – and you really never know what’s going on. Sometimes you don’t even want to interrupt them, so for newbies it will be hard to get to know people on Twitter.
Is Twitter good for business? I think it may be for people who tweet regularly and who tweet valuable information. Thoughtleaders will benefit greatly. It takes effort, though, but the well known bloggers, for example, are used to putting effort in. I believe Twitter will take a bit longer and more effort to gain any monetary value from it. But if you are authentic, bring good information to the table and make an effort to be present several times per day, you will eventually gain at least a good amount of trust from many potential customers. And then this “I know, like and trust you” will probably lead to some business as well.
Another thing that is great about Twitter: if you ever feel lonely and you sit all by yourself in your office, log in to Twitter and you won’t be lonely anymore.
