10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs

Whether your company is just starting out, just starting to turn a profit or already on the verge of an acquisition, as an entrepreneur you’ll be constantly evaluating the tools that will help get your business to the next stage.

Some of the tools in this list will be familiar, but it’s worth taking a moment to reframe how they might become power tools in a business context.

10. Monitter

9. YouTube

8. UserVoice

7. MailChimp

6. Get Satisfaction

5. Twitter

4. Facebook

3. Basecamp

2. LinkedIn

1. Google Apps for Domains

Read full article  from Mashable >

Leveraging Social Media to Boost E-Commerce Holiday Sales

Word of mouth has long been a priceless asset to any business, and technology has expanded the playing field in a whole new way with mobile messaging and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more. Every day, it seems hard to avoid the buzz about social media — who’s on it, what they’re doing and what the latest trend is.

Read full story and full report >

Fastest Growing Marketing Tactics – Social Media and Viral Videos

Two-thirds of marketers have used social media in 2009 and half have used viral videos, making these two formats the fastest-growing tactics in marketing, according to a survey from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), BtoB Magazine and ‘mktg’.

Among marketers using social networking, the top sites being used:

• Facebook (74%)

• YouTube (65%)

• Twitter (63%)

• LinkedIn (60%)

Despite the growing use of social networks and viral videos, marketers do not think they are using these media in the most effective ways and are still struggling with measurement and media-mix allocation issues. The top concerns for marketers when considering newer media platforms are the inability to prove ROI (45%) and worries about not having metrics to properly allocate the mix of traditional and digital media (43%).

On the other hand, the most effective of the newer media platforms are those which marketers have been doing for longer periods of time and those for which more measurable results are available:

• Search engine marketing (SEM) (65%)

• Own website (59%)

• Search engine optimization (SEO) (55%)

• E-mail marketing (45%)

Blogs are the new media format (34%), followed by mobile (28%) and social media (23%). Viral video and podcasts are also of high interest for many B2B marketers who are not using them.

Despite the interest in blogs, mobile and social media, however, the newer media platforms that will get the most spending in 2009 are still the ones that are more established:

• Own website (26%)

• Search engine marketing (19%)

• Online ads, including banners, etc. (17%)

Read  full survey >

Continuous Intelligence: Where Message Meets Moment

Online measurement has become increasingly focused on the integration of online behavior with customer marketing touch-points. Taking a complete view of the customer acquisition life cycle will often generate numerous potential integration points that can be profitably exploited. The goal of every marketing organization should be to achieve consistent relevance around both “message” and “moment.”

Read full article >

Taking Customer Loyalty to the Next Level

Today, loyalty programs come in all shapes and sizes, and they give
retailers, financial institutions and hotels opportunities to reward
their best customers like never before. There are many benefits to
offering a loyalty program that is tailored to your customers. However,
there can be risks, too.

Read full article>

6 Tips for Developing a Social Media Strategy

With the growing popularity of social media, many businesses feel they need to integrate it into their marketing mix, but most aren’t sure where to start or how to develop a plan. Social media is useful for many types of organizations, whether it’s a big brand or small business.

Using social media correctly helps companies engage audiences in new ways, be more personable, develop new connections, and maintain the ones they have. This two-part article will cover the elements of a social media strategy and the steps to build one.

Social media has taken the institutional control of marketing and put it in the hands of consumers or the general public.

1. Research and Listen – Determine who your audience is and where they are online.

2. Building Relationships – One key benefit of social media is building relationships with your clients.

3. Identify Goals and Objectives – You’ll get much farther with social media marketing if you offer something of value first.

4. Develop your Plan – Map out your approach to delivering your products or services to satisfy the needs of your audience.

5. Social Media Tools - Make sure that you have solid, relevant content on your main Web site that you can lead visitors to when they want more detailed information.

6. Measure, Measure - Measuring can be a challenge, because the medium is conversational in nature. You can measure the number of your followers, or those who are participating in the conversation. You can measure Web traffic increases due to your social media efforts. You might gauge the tone of the conversation, and what percentage of participants was influenced by your involvement.

The key is to develop a strategy, identify your metrics for success, and set up your analytics to report if success happens or not. It’s up to you to be innovative on how you engage your audience with the many social media tools available.

Read full article >

4 Steps to implementing a social media marketing plan

Because the concept of  “social media” is still fairly new in the business realm, many companies have yet to implement guidelines or a structured plan of action of how to use social media tools for their advantage.

What is happening instead, are companies rushing into creating Facebook pages and Twitter accounts without much creative thought or strategy.

Here is a quick guideline, outlining how to implement a “social media marketing plan” the smart way.

1. Decide where exactly it is that you want to be online, i.e. Facebook? Twitter? Corporate Blog? Research the best options for your company and also look at what your competition is already doing.

2. Come up with multiple options. Send out your marketing team to do research and come up with ideas.

3. Implementation. This is crucial. Having a team work on the campaign is key–but having the whole team maintain the campaign might not be the best idea.

4. Search the web. On top of what your company is doing for social media—you must also stay on top of what other companies are doing and what your consumers are saying about you!

Read full article >

How To Integrate Social Technologies with Virtual Events

To be successful, virtual –and real world events must have a strategy that integrates social technologies, before, during, and after

Traditional Online Events Vendors Recognize Impacts of Social
Virtual events, where companies host attendees through a digital online experience, continue to captivate marketers.  It’s good for attendees, as they can experience a virtual online event event during an economic downturn, and continue to rely on virtual events for making decisions.   As virtual events continue to grow, expect them to tightly integrate social technologies.

Three Principles Of Modern Events
1. To be successful, virtual –and real world– event planners must abide by the following principles:
2. Events should integrate with existing communities and social networks where they exist.
3. Events should have a strategy that includes the before and after –not just during.

The audience can assert control over the event, so encourage audience participation and know when to get out of the way.
Planners must develop a Pre, During, and Post strategy that integrates social.Today, event planners only think of the fixed event that occurs in a day, they often overlook that a community talks, discusses, and chatters before, during and after an event. They should:
Have a “before’ strategy. Use social tools before an event to increase signups by first locating where their target community is, and use social tools to reach them. Encourage members to tweet and share an event before it occurs, they should create events in Facebook so it triggers updates on the newsfeed.

Integrate existing social tools during an event, thereby increasing interaction. During the event, organizers should be monitoring the social web and chat rooms to see how the crowd is reacting –be ready to react in real time.

Follow up using social tools to aggregate and identify opportunities. Event planners shouldn’t quit once the event is over, the opportunity to further relationships is at hand.

In the Future, Virtual Events Must Integrate Social
• Virtual events will integrate with existing social networks. Virtual events will need to deploy in Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, and Twitter communities, allowing them to login and register with their accounts on those platforms –and then message on these platforms.

• Virtual Events won’t be a limited duration, but will become a persistent experience. Today, virtual events are often a limited duration experience

• Integrate with existing corporate communities. Expect virtual event vendors to develop partnerships with community platform vendors

Event planners will need to measure their influence on the social web. Assign team members to monitor and track occurrence

Read full article >

3 Keys to Improve Your Brand in Social Marketing

Many businesses continue to operate under the assumption that a website, a basic product offering or great brochure will bring profits and revenue to their bottom line. Those days are over.  Brands are now crossing over into the hybrid marketing era that incorporates some form of social media.

You already know the importance of product, price, placement and promotion, but none of that matters without people. People is what build relationship and creates opportunities.

Whether your brand provides information products, consumer goods or services, one thing still remains the same: the most effective marketing is still word-of-mouth (WOM).

WOM generates buzz and it gets passed along over and over and over again in a highly influential way. It’s how friends tell friends about the things that excite them or what business owners tell other business owners on what works for their business.

According to the latest Nielsen Global Consumer Survey: 90% of consumers said they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trusted consumer opinions posted online.

Here are 3 keys to improve your brand while marketing in social media:

1) Move the “free” line

If you want to be part of the decision making process, you need to be considered as a key opinion leader or resource. Supply your audience with free resources such as reports, statistics and guides that can help elevate your perceived expertise.  Your customer will compare before they a purchase anyway so why not give them a reason to start liking you because you’ve willing to share the wealth. If the free information you provide is valuable, you’re already a step ahead of your competition not to mention that you’re turning them into your “A” customers by providing all the necessary training and education.

2) Crowdsource for improvements
While the success of your brand’s often comes down to the effectiveness of your message, it pays to ask questions.

The customers that give you feedback are often your most loyal customers so why not reward them by fulfilling a few of their suggestions.  Keep in mind that providing what they want should not be the main source of innovation, rather it’s a good starting point.

3) Embrace brand transparency
People appreciate honesty and integrity so all you have to do is stay consistent and admit when you’re wrong.  If you try to twist the truth, you’ll not last long and people won’t forget manipulations and deceptions.

Read full article >

HOW TO: Build Your Company’s Profile on LinkedIn

LinkedIn, through its networking, question and answer, and application features is already a powerful tool for maintaining and establishing relationships in the business world.  But it can also be an enormously valuable way to attract top talent to your company, especially if you use all of the options available to you.

While posting a job to LinkedIn is similar to any other job website – adding details about the position, skills, and requirements – where the site separates itself is with company profiles, allowing you to provide potential candidates with a lot more information about your company and the people that work there.  Here’s how they work and how to set one up:

1. To get started, go to the “Companies” menu on LinkedIn.  From there, select “Add Company”

2. Enter basic information about your company, like its description, number of employees, and industry it operates in.

3. Follow LinkedIn’s wizard for creating your company profile – you’ll be able to add a logo, locations, and a feed for your company blog.

Once you’ve completed LinkedIn’s steps for getting setup, your company profile will be available. Now is where it gets interesting though.  In addition to showing off the basic information you provided, LinkedIn will pull in data about your company from around the site.

LinkedIn also does analysis of your company and the connections that your employees have on the network.

LinkedIn recently also added a premium product – Custom Company Profiles – that lets you add more features, like videos about your company and positions, interactive polls, and several customization options for recruiting.

Read full article >