Wondering how to make your content stand out from the 27 million pieces shared in the U.S. each day?
When I first started working with bloggers and writing online copy, I never paid much attention to the topic of SEO using keywords and trending topics, but once I began to understand it, I realized how critical it was. Social platforms as well as press releases use keywords to optimize and get you more power to be seen.
Written by guest blogger and Perspectiv3 social network manager, Cassandra D’Aiello
There are only two things you can be certain about in the social media world: 1. When you think you know everything there is to know, there’s always more. 2. When you think you’re caught up on all the latest changes, everything will be changed again.
Hours and hours of research can be done to assist your social networking skills, but in the end, does it really help? Yes, yes, and yes. In the year 2013, you are hurting your business if you are not part of the social networking world.
Chances are if you’re not writing about your business on social media, someone else (whether it be a competitor out to get vengeance or a customer raving about your service) is. So you’re sitting there saying to yourself, “my business already has a Facebook and Twitter.” There’s more! You cannot just limit your small business to those two social platforms. Clients, ex-clients, customers, ex-customers, non-customers, etc. are reviewing your company on other business review sites, such as Merchant Circle, Google Places, Yelp, and Yahoo Local. These sites are specifically designed for customers and potential customers to review and comment about your business. These websites are another crucial stepping stone in communicating and gaining feedback from your clientele.
Where do you draw the line? First things first, do not overwhelm yourself. Nothing is worse than seeing a half-finished Twitter page with an egg as your profile picture. It’s best to begin with one platform and use it consistently, building it out with great content that has relevance for your audience. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are essential, but build them one at a time. All other sites can wait until you have established a foothold in these top three.
Social Butterflye recently published an article entitled, “The Top 5 Mistakes Made by Small Businesses on Social Media.” The five points are as follows:
1. Are your social media platforms targeting your demographics?
2. Did you start out strong and slowly lost momentum for posting?
3. Are you assigning the proper employee to manage your platforms?
4. Are your followers/friends potential clients or just random followers?
5. Are you engaging with your followers and not just promoting your own business?
In simpler terms, it’s quality over quantity!
Written by guest blogger and Perspectiv3 managing partner, Gerard McGowan
How does social media impact your business?
Most businesses face significant hurdles in today’s world, such as the economy, increased competition, shrinking margins as well many others. People recognize how critical social media could be for their business, but they don’t know where to begin and choose to focus on other priorities.
In the last decade, social media has been the paradigm shift in online sales and marketing that the Internet was to the world in the mid to late 90’s. If you are still of the mindset that social media doesn’t work for your market, then have a look at companies in your industry who are marketing on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc. They wouldn’t be using it if it didn’t work. People in your line of business are making money by engaging in social media and so can you.
Excluding the obvious business decision that marketing on social media can make you more money and deliver a low cost return on investment (this is a fact), there are a many other quantifiable reasons why you should be going social whether you opt to use a professional social media company for guidance or research and manage it in-house.
The social media adoption curve is still very much in its upward trend and you only have to think about the new social media platforms gathering momentum to reinforce this; a good example being Pinterest, which has grown exponentially over the past 12-18 months with registered users now upwards of 12 million.
Like the Internet and SEO (to a certain extent), social media marketing is size neutral and the barriers to entry are non-existent (however, expert know-how can certainly help). So what does this mean to you and your business? It means that you can complete with the largest and most established organizations in your industry and you can win!
3) You can lower your cost of sale
By not investing in social media, you are not winning those low cost, high return-on-investment customers that are communicating with your competitors on social media platforms. If you need a reason to buy into social media, let it be this – there is a window of opportunity here to make being a small to medium sized business work for you on social media. Whilst your largest competitors are getting through the red tape and processes that are set in stone, you can just press on with getting going.
This window of opportunity won’t last forever though so the faster you move now, the bigger head start you’ll have on your competitors. That’s where hiring a social media company will stand you in good stead as they’ll have you up and running on all the major platforms in no time, giving you plenty of time to start building and engaging your audience whilst your competitors play catch-up.
This is perhaps the most important reason of all. For sales organizations to succeed in today’s business environment, they must first accept that buyer behavior has changed. As an example, a 2012 survey1 of IT decision makers conducted by Forrester Research showed that:
Forrester’s latest research shows that 59% of online buyers are active on social networking sites at least weekly, and one-third of online users have become a fan of a company or brand via social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Connect with customers wanting to talk to you. Like paid advertising and organic search results in Google, Bing and the other search engines, being present, active and engaging through social media will place you in front of new audiences at key stages in their information seeking and buying activities.
*How Social Media is Changing Brand Building, Forrester, May 7, 2012
Endorsements is a new feature that makes it easier to help you give kudos to your connections for their skills and expertise. Using one click, you can endorse your connections for a skill they’ve listed on their profile or recommend one they haven’t added yet. Think your connection is great at business development AND customer relations? Be generous and let them know. BUT above all, as in all social connections, be honest and sincere with your praise.
Here’s how to endorse your connections:
Want to see who has endorsed you? LinkedIn will send you an email whenever you are endorsed. Scroll to the bottom of your profile page under “Skills and Expertise” to see contacts who have said you’re great at what you do. See below.
Want to learn more? Perspectiv3 offers a personal training session that will help you and your staff build on and leverage existing connections to identify the right influencers, create lead opportunities, demonstrate value to prospective buyers, deepen account penetration and gather intelligence needed to sell to today’s buyer. Email for more info.
If you use your company status updates only to post company news and content, you’re not using the platform optimally. Use posts to begin a conversation or ask people to take action in order to get maximum visibility on this area of LinkedIn. That’s because when you get members to comment, your updates get maximum visibility. For every like, comment or share by your page followers, that update helps spread the word to each follower’s entire network.
Some examples of company page status updates that created dialogue or contained a call to action:
Here’s another example:
The Social Media Examiner gives some great creative ideas for your company page status update that will help generate activity:
Want to learn more? Perspectiv3 offers a personal training session that will help you and your staff build on and leverage existing connections to identify the right influencers, create lead opportunities, demonstrate value to prospective buyers, deepen account penetration and gather intelligence needed to sell to today’s buyer. Email for more info.
Great content, and lots of it, is what you need to keep your social networking in high gear. These five tips will give you ideas on how to create expert content, with limited resources:
Tip #1: Curate
This is the cornerstone of a robust content management program. Similar to a museum curator, you don’t create the artwork; you collect and assemble it into a relevant showpiece. This involves organizing just where you are going to get your content from, and that’s not Wikipedia.
A well-organized collection of useful information will motivate your audience not only to read, but also share with others.
Trusted, credible sources are key to curating good content. Start by building a go-to list of sites that you rely on regularly. For me, as a social businessperson, a few I subscribe to via email for updates are: http://dailyinfographic.com/ , http://www.ragan.com/Main/Home.aspx and http://www.business2community.com/ In addition, I use Facebook to like pages such as Mashable.com/tech to get all the technology news by the master curated site on the web.
Tip #2: Crowdsourcing
Here’s yet another way of collecting knowledge from different sources, where the collection itself is the value. You’ll want to ask subject matter experts in your network a specific topic-based question or two and summarize your findings. Here’s an example of expert shared tips, which makes for a perfect published piece: Laptop Life Tips: Experts Share 10 Tricks To Make Your Computer Last Longer.
Or you can take a more public poll. Facebook recently added a Poll app called “Ask a Question.” Survey Monkey also allows free surveys and gives you a link to drive traffic to. LinkedIn Answers offers a chance to ask industry professionals for feedback and opinions.
Here’s a question: “What percentage of your marketing budget are you going to use on creating content this year?”
Tip #3: Comment:
I just read a story about Big Data and where it’s headed. Well, if I’m a systems architect, I just may have a lot to say about that. I cite the story, and then add my commentary. It’s also good practice to notify its author and build a warm relationship. Follow him/her on their social sites as well-you’re building press credentials for later.
Tip #4 - Use Numbers and Lists:
Research shows that the highest rated posts on the web organize their content into numerical lists. 5 Ways to Create Content, 3 Top Server Consolidation Methods, 7 Favorite Blogs (this one included). A list that is well sourced and has relevance will inspire your readers to comment and engage. No room for fluff here. Quality is the key, as demonstrated in this article by HubSpot, “The Top 10 Qualities of High Quality Lists Posts.”
Tip #5 - Interview
My colleague, Kathy Tito does this very well. In “The Bootstrap” blog, she finds people of interest in technology marketing and interviews them Q & A style in a candid, no-nonsense way. Not only does it make for some great storytelling, but also she has acquired some great business contacts along the way.
“We’ve hired an intern to run our social media, so we’ve got that under control.” I can’t tell you how many times I hear that from executives in the B2B space. Really? A college student or recent grad doing the social infrastructure for your complex B2B channel environment?
It concerns me when I see well-established firms hiring “interns” to do their social media. Do they have a deep understanding of business development in a complex, rapidly changing B2B marketplace? I guess that they may have logged more hours in on mobile apps, or Facebook, but can they generate leads in a complex technology channel? Do they know how to engage with a CIO, solutions architect or Director of IT? Do they know what content to post and how to curate content for optimal networking?
In my experience, what makes any social business development effort successful is a deep understanding of how the industry that the business lives in works. It includes the nuances of channel relationships, profit margins, product demand, sales lifecycles, etc. The art of social networking on platforms is a bonus…after you understand all of these aspects in business.
My colleague, Kathy Tito, a veteran technology demand generator sums it up well when she says, “It’s not “time logged behind the device” that makes you a success. It’s knowing how to generate content and do relevant networking.” First, you need to understand the business–the social networking is a tool that adds finesse and relevance to your business development efforts, not efforts to be taken lightly.
photo courtesy of purematter.com
Today I’m going to discuss the importance of including great subject lines in your communications. Whether you’re writing an e-newsletter, memo, press release or blog title, think of the headlines in a newspaper, always getting you to notice, always getting you to read on, always getting you to take action.
Recently, I received an e-newsletter from a tree care company that provided the most amazing statistics about tree care and how an ash tree-killing insect had arrived in this part of the country. It offered statistics, insect news and advice on how to preserve your valuable trees from this hazardous pest. Having been in the business for 25+ years, this company has nearly 20 certified tree experts on staff. It just doesn’t get better than that.
The subject line? “ABC Press Announcement”
What do you think the read rate for that was? Let’s look at it from a different perspective. How about a subject line like; “Ash tree killing insects are here, tips to save your trees,” or “Save your ash trees from killer bugs,” even “5 ways to prevent your ash trees from death by insect.”
Which one would you be most eager to read? The latter compelling subject lines instill emotion and invoke action; not much to grab your attention in the original one. Understand? Next time you write your subject line, don’t do it as an afterthought; make it interesting enough to get the content you worked so hard on, opened, read and most important, acted on.
p.s. Worried about that ash-tree killing bug? Get more info here.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
I saw the most phenomenal idea a couple of days ago on Twitter that is a simple way to begin lead nurturing….via Twitter. When we decided to follow @FalconStor, a technology company, on Twitter (we carefully choose who we follow so as to keep our ratio of followers to followed balanced), they replied with a link to a free chapter download of their guide, “Storage Area Network for Dummies.” Now I’m no dummy, but I know a good opportunity when I see one. When folks click through to the link, they get not only the download, but also an expert video on storage, a blog link, latest company related news and links for social sharing.
Twitter is the perfect driver for nurture campaigns like this one. It’s using the strengths of social media to educate by sharing. Kudos FalconStor!!!
I read a great e-book by Hubspot this week about using the new social site that recently topped 11 million unique visits, How to Use Pinterest for Business. The book gives some great ideas for us B2B marketers, Hubspot advertising aside, I did learn a few key things about the cool new platform, Pinterest. Here are just a couple:
1-Put a picture in your blog and pin it to your Pinterest board. When someone clicks on it in Pinterest, they get to your blog. Bam-instant blog traffic boost!
2-Instead of selling your wares on the site, use it to complement your organization’s offerings or culture. For example, if you sell IT hardware, you could have a board that highlights the history of computers through pictures. Link them to strategic sites on your website or facebook page. Or post pictures of your employees on an activities board to show the human side to your brilliance.
3-Showcase your content. Using SEO friendly keywords that are part of your marketing strategy, name a board that consists of screen shots of your latest white paper, e-book or even video. When people click on it, it takes them to the original.
You can even add a pin-it button to your website for people to share your own visual content on their boards.
This thing is cool, I’ve just gotten started, let’s see where it goes…happy pinning!
