Archive for social+marketing
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.
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.
For the Twitter novice: How to make sense of Twitter without getting crazy
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Many small business owners join Twitter to attract more clients and get their name out there, but often encounter a confusing world of “insiders” and do not understand what benefits Twitter can actually offer them.
That’s what usually happens: if the Twitter novice gets an account and hopes to be able to dive right into the social network, she or he is in for a big disappointment. You hear that Twitter can be very effective to get yourself known as an expert of your niche, but how on earth are you meant to use it? At first glance it just looks like a crazy bundle of inane chatter about five million different topics. “What’s the fuss all about?”, you think, and want to log off again. But hang on… read a bit further.
What is Twitter? It is a microblogging tool with the aim to network with people who you either know personally or who have similar interests or business ideas. Twitter is a platform where you can tell the world (or better: the people you choose to talk to) what you are currently doing, what plans you have for the day or for your business in general. You can share tips and tricks or brainstorm, but all this has to be packaged into only 140 characters, which is good news for the busy small business owner!
You can actually learn a lot on Twitter when you choose your network wisely. Networking on Twitter is called “following” and it means you click on a person’s profile to “follow” them. Almost immediately you can see what this person tweets (talks) about. If you follow a market leader in your field of interest you can benefit greatly from the advice they post into cyberspace.
Twitter can also be a personal tool for people who like to keep in touch, without any business interests. This makes it a great platform for your friends and family, especially when you are busy and can’t always keep in touch by phone or email. Just get a Twitter account, follow your friends and ask them to follow you. This way they will know what you are up to in an instant.
Twitter at first is overwhelming, confusing and weird. But once get into it and have a followership that is a bit bigger (over 50) it is very interesting, but you need to filter through the rubbish. Unfortunately, there are spammers on Twitter, too.
A tip: If you get a follow notification from someone, you should check out their profile before you follow them as well, otherwise you have the whole Twitter homepage full of inane sales messages that at some stage will get on your nerves. Following someone is a voluntary activity; you do not need to follow them as well if you are not interested in what they are doing. It is good etiquette to follow most people who follow you, but if you feel the person has nothing you want to know about and maybe even appears a bit dodgy then just do not follow them.
Make sure you check out the person’s title, website, statement and the number of followers and followees. These should be fairly equal for most Twitter members. If you see a profile of someone who follows 5,679 people and only 23 people follow him (or her) then you know this person is probably not worth your time. Quite often this is the case with internet spammers who follow a large number of people, but don’t want to add value to anybody’s conversation, they just want a quick sale and usually offer only one update with a link to their sales page. This is boring! Sometimes, though, thought leaders and celebrity type Twitter users have a huge following, but do not follow a lot of people. In this case you can probably benefit from following because these people post a lot of valuable advice.
Go for the normal, genuine people who follow a number of people and who are followed by a similar number of people. And check out what they actually tweet about.
It is fine to follow someone who has only 34 followers and follows 50 people, in the same way as it is a good idea to follow someone who follows 8,754 people and is followed by 10,857 people. It means there is some equal sharing in place. People who do not follow anybody are probably too self-absorbed to be a good contact, but if you feel you can still learn from that person’s tweets (messages), by all means follow them, you can still decide later to “un-follow” them.
Twitter thrives on sharing and getting to know each other. Try to post messages that have some value to people. You can choose to send just status updates, like “working on a client’s new Wordpress website” or “going to a dog clicker training course” or “just heading up Mount Everest, will be back next year” because they reveal your interests or work expertise, which can help to connect with others. But remember that posts like “wiping the benchtop”, “eating a sandwich” or “going to the bathroom” might be a bit too trivial. The consequence of too many trivial posts could be that people decide to stop following you, and that can be disappointing.
So think about some interesting information to share with your followers. Think value. Be authentic, do not pretend you are someone you are not, do not use a fake photo and say you are Britney Spears’ baby monkey when you are not. You are, after all, on Twitter to grow your business.
Now get out there and have fun…
