4 Tips on Managing Social Media Goals and Expectations

People have been setting some strange, unrealistic, and possibly misguided expectations recently in social media. While you might believe that you’re only worth something in social media if you have a huge audience, the simple fact is that it’s not true. Understanding what you want out of social media and having smart goals can mean the difference between frustration and enjoyment.

1. Popularity game vs. real value
Don’t get caught up in the popularity game. Find your own path in the social media world, one that is linked to your enjoyment and education.

2. Avoiding pitfalls
Be aware of your emotions and how they can direct your interactions on social media.

3. Setting goals
Goal-setting, and writing those goals down, is an essential component of success.

4. Remember, it’s not a race
Social media is about people, conversations, friendships, education, and communication.

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5 reasons Facebook is better than Twitter for your business

In the world of social media marketing, Facebook is king. You hear a lot about Twitter, but comparatively speaking, Facebook represents a much larger and more mature platform for marketing your business. Of course, smart companies will utilize any number of social networking sites to promote their products. But, if you are a small or medium sized business and only have resources to focus on one, you should strongly consider Facebook.

Here are five reasons why Facebook is better than Twitter for promoting your business:

1. Community / Size
As popular as Twitter has become, Facebook has a vastly larger audience. According to Compete.com, Twitter has a monthly visitor total of about 22 million users. Facebook weighs in at about 122 million users.

2. Analytics
If you decide to sink your time and resources into establishing a presence on a social network (either Facebook or Twitter) you are going to want to make sure you’re measuring your return on investment.

3. Viral Promotion
In a sense, social media marketing is about giving your fans a platform to talk about you in a positive way.

4. Advertising Platform
Any business owner can create pay per click advertisements on Facebook to promote their business page or events.

5. Facebook Connect API
Finally, Facebook offers web developers the ability to extend their own web sites into the Facebook platform.

Again, the most savvy internet marketers will find ways to use a mix of social networking sites to get their message out, but Facebook is by far the most mature and largest social network for marketing and advertising. If you are a business owner you should definitely sign up to Facebook and create your own Facebook business page today.

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Social media and managing the marketing message

Social media brings broadcast and rapid customer feedback to the masses. Never before has small and medium businesses been able to so rapidly enter markets. Tweeting, blogging, YouTubing, etc., makes live broadcasting available to the masses. You can easily reach hundreds and thousands of Twitter followers and customers. It is phenomenal.

This stated, the company message and sales process needs to drive what is in the new media. Not the other way around. There are organizations extending their current services (PR firms, Ad agencies) to social media strategies as well as organizations that strictly specialize in nothing but new media.

Once the followers and the hits start coming, the next question is how to translate this into real deals that hit the sales pipeline. Nothing is more frustrating to the executive team than hearing how great a marketing program is going and not being able to quantify the results. This makes lead nurturing critical as marketing navigates the development of truly interested uyers.

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Building Strong Customer Relationships

Understand your customers. The key is, what’s going to help somebody’s business, help them grow their business. If, ultimately, you’re bringing them an opportunity to add greater profitability, greater efficiency to their organization then, by definition, they should look to you as someone that they see as a valued partner.

It’s key that you understand their business, whatever their business is, and make sure that whatever the offering, you give them slots into the model, that you’re not trying to fit a round peg into a square hole sort of thing.

You have to, first and foremost, get to whoever the senior decision-makers are within that company. Often, buyers aren’t owners of the company or part of their executive or directors team, and their objective might be just to get the lowest price possible.

Deliver on your promises time and again. No good or strong friendships are just based on the first impressions, they have to be built up over a set period of time; certainly it’s not going to happen overnight.

You have to be able to provide your customer with something that they feel they haven’t as of yet seen from someone else. Again, when you’re in a commoditized world like we are, that’s not easy. I would think the only way to do that is to develop that relationship, and again, time is the only way that’s going to work.

Maintain an honest relationship. If you’re going to say, ‘I’ll have it there Friday’ … make sure it’s there Friday. If you can’t have it there Friday, make sure you follow up on the original commitment and say, ‘OK, I know I said Friday; it’s now going to be Monday.’ Don’t just walk away from the commitment you made and cross your fingers with the hope that it goes away.

If you’re going to make a commitment, live and die by it. If you’re going to miss that commitment for whatever reason, be honest about it.

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Can Social Media Help Your Business?

Social media is more than just a buzzword. There are opportunities and measureable results that it offers that can be extremely beneficial to companies of all sizes. While Facebook and Twitter may be included it’s more than that

Many times people get so caught up in the tools that little time is spent talking and strategizing and about what social media can actually do. Tools are great if you know how to use them, but at some point the tools need to have purpose.

If you have a good product, a detailed business plan, and customer service policies in place and willing to invest time, here are a few things that social media can do for your business

Benefits that Social Media Could Provide

• Gives you the opportunity to begin listening to what others are saying about your company online.
• Allow you to have one-to-one communication with your consumers.
• It can be used to gather feedback about new products.
• It personalizes your corporation/brand
• Provides channels to produce and distribute exclusive content that can be shared which in return extends the voice of your brand.
• Can be used to share exclusive information and offers to your loyalists.
• It’s an extension to your public relations strategies
• Provides platforms to build communities for your brand enthusiasts around your product and company.
• Offers opportunities that will bring exposure to your company.
• Provides potential opportunities for word-of-mouth buzz about your company and products.

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5 tips for creating a successful social media campaign

Beyond just tweeting, more and more companies are starting to run social media campaigns to engage with prospects and customers.

It seems that the demand for B2C social media campaigns is high and still growing.  If you are preparing for a campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Ning, MySpace, or any other online social community, you might benefit from the advice offered by those gathered at the social media summit.

1. Be very user-centric.
Before you plan your campaign, find out which sites your target audience is visiting, and what they spend most of their time doing.  Design a campaign around the users’ preferences and needs.

2. Communicate with users in their tone instead of a PR tone.
Try to create a relationship with a prospect or customer, don’t feed them PR statements.

3. Make your campaign interesting and engaging by creating contests.
Allow the users to interact with your company and with each other. Give them something to talk about with their friends, because ultimately what you want is for them to become your marketers.

4. Social media campaigns need to be fluid.
You will have to change them frequently (every few weeks) and make adjustments as you go.

5. Build your campaigns to scale.
Be prepared for an explosive growth in hits and plan ahead.

If you do things right, chances are you will get a high response percentage; be ready with an analytics package to measure your campaign’s success.

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80% of journalists say companies without a website are less credible.

Arketi Group, a high-tech business-to-business public relations and marketing firm, released its 2009 Arketi Web Watch Survey. The survey reveals 68 percent of journalists consider the impact of social media on BtoB reporting to be positive.

A free copy of the findings is available at www.arketi.com/surveys.

“While high-profile social media tools like blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are of interest to journalists, our findings indicate BtoB marketers should not discount tried-and-true Internet technology,” said Mike Neumeier, principal of Arketi. “Search engine optimization and building media-friendly websites site remain vital to reaching the business media.”

When asked how journalists use the Internet:

   --  95 percent say search
   --  92 percent say reading news
   --  92 percent say emailing
   --  89 percent say finding story ideas
   --  87 percent say finding news sources
   --  75 percent say reading blogs
   --  64 percent say watching webinars
   --  61 percent say watching YouTube
   --  59 percent say social networks

88% of journalists say they spend 20 or more hours a week on the Internet

85% have a LinkedIn account

55% are on Facebook

24 % tweet on Twitter.

92% of journalists say they get story ideas from news releases

85% turn to industry sources, and an equal number tap PR contacts.

12% have used Twitter to find a source or story idea.

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5 phases of leveraging Facebook for Business

You run the marketing for a business of any size and you’re trying to figure out how to leverage Facebook to increase your reach and generate more sales. With so much buzz, Facebook is hard to ignore but many people have yet to figure out the most effective way for using the site to generate sales.

Marketing through Facebook does not mimic the standard three step online sales funnel: click, read (learn about the product or service), purchase.

Phase 1: Awareness
In the Facebook sales funnel there are two things you want to make users aware of: your service and your presence on Facebook.

Phase 2: Education
For those visitors that already know your product or service, you may not need to do much education. For the more inquisitive user who has never heard of you or your company, you’ll need to educate them.

Phase 3: Engagement
“Enagement” has become the cornerstone of social network marketing.

Phase 4: Action
In contrast to search engine advertising, which involves clicking an ad and then taking some sort of action, the Facebook sales funnel involves building a relationship and presenting multiple opportunities to take an action.

Phase 5: Repeat Engagement
Now that you’ve presented a call to action and some of your users have taken that action, you need to continue to engage them.

Ultimately each business needs to determine what the best strategy is for them based on the resources available but the Facebook sales process will help you to generate valuable customer relationships, not just one-time customers.

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Companies are effectively using social-media tools for customer care

The popular communications technology has helped companies quickly and inexpensively respond to customer complaints, answer questions and tailor products and services. It has supplemented current customer services, easing the load on call centers and expensive mailers that most consumers abhor. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and online software services such as LiveOps, Salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies are all are being used to improve customer service, retain users and gain a competitive advantage.

As more companies effectively use social-media tools for customer care, it also is becoming easier to shift customer-relations resources to the U.S. and feed into the fledgling “homeshoring” trend. Home-based workers have become de rigueur among employers to take advantage of better technology, gain productivity from employees no longer tied to long commutes and leverage the expertise of local workers.

For many, call centers are out of the question — too frustrating, with long waits — and e-mail is too slow in an era of instantaneous online communications.

With so many social-media tools available, and consumers increasingly using them, this raises the question: Are call centers, direct mailers — even e-mail — things of the past for customer care  Though invaluable, social media is just a fraction of a company’s customer-service arsenal.

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9 SEO Tips for Attractive Search Engine Friendly Web Design

SEO: time-intensive, ever changing, and highly misunderstood. Creating a website design that is appealing, while also search engine friendly, is one of the hardest parts about SEO web design.

If you’re a designer, are your designs really search friendly?

A lot of misconceptions about SEO still exist in the web design community and many designers, who have at least some knowledge, are often acting with outdated information. Once a designer understands the value of SEO, there is still the concern of how to keep a design attractive, while also being search friendly.

Designers love beautiful websites and SEOs love optimized content and code, but neither should fool themselves, because these days, both matter. In that spirit, I’ve put together a list of 9 SEO tips that help keep your stunning website optimized for search engines.

1. It’s not the same old SEO
SEO can be hard to keep up with, because it is always changing. Today, SEO doesn’t mean a site has to be ugly.

2. Links talk
Links tell search engines what pages are about.

3. Design is linkbait
Great design improves credibility and the user experience.

4. Look at search bots as browsers
Considering a search bot as a disabled user or another type of browser, is exactly the type of approach needed for search friendly web design.

5. Smoke some hash
# The hash mark creates an element in the URL that is not considered unique by the search engines, so it is dropped.

6. Use SEO friendly JavaScript
Any time you touch technologies like JavaScript, you need to tread carefully

7. Flash is OK, sometimes.
Ask someone who casually follows SEO news, and they’ll tell you flash can now be crawled.
BUT . . .
* Do not include an entire site on one page.
* Do not use flash as the navigation.
* Do not include important content in flash.

8. CSS image replacement
CSS image replacement is one way to make a site look great, while also being search friendly.

9. Have great linking with footers
If you have a design that will be compromised by the inclusion of a robust navigation above the fold, a solid footer is a great solution.

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