Archive for social+media
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.
Advantages of Online Reputation Management for Companies
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Constantly maintaining online reputations is one of the reasons why Online Reputation Management exists. In real sense, Online Reputation Management (ORM) was created to help business owners and professionals deal with bad press.
Even a large company or a small one could not get rid of the receiving end of negative publicity. Remember that the internet never fails to forget. Everything we do online leaves a digital mark that will never go away. This gives a reason why Online Reputation Management serves as a necessity in the field of business today.
See the advantages of Online Reputation Management for companies:
- It improves customer satisfaction by gaining insights from consumers about what is good and bad about their product or services. This increases perceptions of brand/ product by creating opportunities to listen to and engage consumers.
- It helps on gaining insights about their competitors and their customers’ perceptions about their products and services. This helps in the understanding of the relationship between user generated content and traditional forms of online media, e.g. news, print, etc.
- It maintains shareholder value by mitigating risk by having ears close to the ground where opinions about a business are being formed and propagated.
- They’re likely to be engaged in more effective Public Relations by understanding who the real influencers are.
- ORM takes a role in providing early warning systems for reactive and defensive PR.
- This may also help in reducing marketing dollars by learning how to reach out to customers more cheaply.
- May reduce internal costs by employing services which save time and effort, as well as money.
- ORM helps to identify gaps for products and services which can be developed for profitable niche markets.
- It gains insight into online networks and keywords and key phrases found in user-generated content, which can help to bolster natural search results about the person, product, or business.
Tips for maximizing the efficiency of your online reputation management endeavors:
1. Set up your social networking sites with your own name.
In other words, you need to create an interlinked “web” of these powerful social networks – that all point to you. This is profoundly important because it establishes your presence in the major search engines like Google. Using aliases, pen names or otherwise will not help establish your branding effectiveness.
2. Try to get the same username set up for all of your social media engagement profiles.
3. When you add any type of content to your social networking sites, keep your online reputation management plan in mind. You should add relevant materials.
Seeing the advantages of Online Management training, I can say that it’s a mistake for companies to launch an online reputation management campaign after the damage of bad press has already spread which is a mistake. Everyone must take a preventative approach to protect business.
This great post was contributed by Eleanor Marks Prior, Wordpress Whiz and Social Media maven.
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.
“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.
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…
Launch of my New Zealand specific website
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Hello again,
I have just launched my new Wordpress website specifically designed for my local, New Zealand, market. I feel it’s important to keep in mind that there are some slight differences in the local market to, for example, the US market.
Our economy is a bit different, our business landscape features mainly small businesses and hardly any large corporates and we are the country of Kiwi ingenuity (which means, we do a lot ourselves). So, thinking of this I believe that Kiwis want to read some different things than international visitors. Please correct me if you feel that I’m wrong.
One major difference is, for example, that there are not many Virtual Assistants in New Zealand. If you do a search, you will probably find a handfull of women who call themselves Virtual Assistants, but they usually run their business under the secretarial services or secretarial support header.
But not all Virtual Assistants are secretaries who just work out of a home office, many international Virtual Assistants add online marketing, ecommerce and social media marketing to their repertoire. This is a whole new field that New Zealand based Secretarial Services can bite their teeth into.
Marketing services is usually more brick and mortar driven here. Many local marketing consultants will focus on the offline activities while online marketing falls into the hand of webdesigners. Unfortunately, the webdesigners are often not skilled in online marketing (the psychological bits). They are amazing when it comes to the design of stunning websites, but the whole area of persuasion, customer involvement and content effectiveness seems to be something that needs some updating.
Another thing is that many Kiwis haven’t really made use of the idea of blogging yet. Many NZ websites with blogs I’ve visited so far hardly ever update their blogs. There’s usually one post made in May, another one in September and maybe one to say Merry Christmas or Happy New Year.
What is missing is the understanding that blogs can be immensely powerful. Looking at the 6 and 7 figure earning international bloggers (check out some of these blogs on my links page) the tool of blogging is highly undervalued. Ok, I understand that most of us will never earn that sort of money with our blog posts, but how about reputation management and customer relations?
Aren’t we all still stuck in the olden times when a business or service would look down on us, the little customer, and don’t ask how we like the service or products. The thing is only that people have changed. We are not that “quiet” anymore and we don’t believe in the authority of businesses anymore. And it’s not only Enron’s fault.It’s that we woke up and found our voices. We want to have a say and if we can’t have that, we just stop buying from these businesses. Easy. And the businesses don’t know why. Hmmm.
Maybe a blog could help to listen to the customer and finding out what they think or what they need. It’s well worth trying. I definitely will.
