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.
Now that you’re here, I promise to make it worth your while. You’re very busy so I’ll keep it short. This blog is written for our friends, clients, colleagues and partners in hopes that they will take away something valuable to them that not only helps them in their job, but also as they navigate the brave new world of business and its transparency that blurs the line between personal and business lives. Stay tuned!
