Category Archives: Social Media Marketing

Social media is the most popular online activity. It’s even more popular than Web browsing, according to Jay Baer’s webinar, “7 Steps to Create Winning Social Media Strategies.” During the webinar, Baer shared useful information for companies who want to utilize social media for marketing purposes to help promote their brand and drive business to their website and location. Here are 7 tips from Baer to develop a winning social media campaign for your company.

Recognize that social media impacts your business in ways that nothing else does. Anything that happens to your company (whether it’s good or bad) has the potential to become public through social media, whether your company wants it to or not. When it comes to social media, it’s smart to get suggestions from people in all departments of the company. Everyone in the organization should take some ownership and participate in social media in order to keep the company’s image positive.

Listen to online conversations. People are already talking about your company online. Listen in to those conversations by exploring Facebook, Twitter, review sites and more to see what people think of you. Once you figure out what’s being said about you, you can use that information to guide your marketing strategy.

Set your goals. What’s the point of your social media campaign? Do you want to educate others, raise brand awareness, generate sales or increase customer loyalty? Maybe you want to do all of those things. The best thing to do is pick one to concentrate on. Once you’ve mastered that, then you can take on another goal.

Get people excited about your business. Think about who your customers are. How do they use social media? What is their age, gender and location? These are important things to think about when posting on social media networks. You want to make sure the information will appeal to them and encourage them to get excited about your company. The customer relationship looks like this: Unaware (have never heard of your company)à Aware (have heard of your company but never tried your service/product) à Trial (have tried your service/product once) à Repeat/Enthusiast (use your service/product frequently) à Advocate (encourage others to use your service/product). In order to move people from “unaware” to “advocate,” you need to get them pumped about your product or service.

Figure out what your “one thing” is. Find one thing that’s special about your company and use your social media to highlight that unique thing. If every company in your industry has the same special offer as you, what makes yours so special? Example: Apple = Innovation, Disney = Magic, Volvo = Safety, You = To Be Determined. Until you find out what your “one thing” is, it’s going to be hard to get people psyched about your company.

Find your “home base” social media network. Instead of trying to conquer all of the different social networks (which can be a daunting task,) find out which social media outlet is the best to connect with your customers. This will be your social media home base. Then use the other social media networks to drive people back to your home base. For example, Jay Baer said he uses his blog as his home base then uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. to drive traffic to his blog.

Track your progress. Use reporting to figure out which methods are working for you and which are not. Without reporting, you may be wasting time on some social media networks or marketing techniques that don’t work. Make sure to review and analyze your reports so you can see what’s working and what doesn’t. Then you can keep revising your marketing strategy in order to find success.

Google+ is Google’s up-and-coming social network that makes it easy to share content as well as find content you’re interested in reading. The network is currently in beta mode which means you must be invited to join. It also has yet to unveil its brand pages; however even in its early stages the social media marketing potential of this network is evident. Here are three reasons why Internet marketers should pay attention to Google+:

Search engine optimization: One application of Google+ is the +1’s. This is similar to the Facebook “like.” The more +1’s a post gets, the more relevant Google believes it to be. This allows SEO to be more reliant on relevancy rather than “black hat” or spam-like marketing techniques.

Reaching your target audience: Google+ makes it easier for your content to reach the people who are really interested in reading it. The more you use Google+, the more it’s able to show you relevant content that it knows you will like. This means that people who are really interested in your content will be able to find it easily and they’ll be more likely to read and trust the information presented to them.

Content sharing: Google+ makes it easy to share certain content only with certain people through their use of “Circles.” Circles allow marketers to be able to specifically target who they share content with within their network of followers. This means that people who are interested in the product or service, but might not be interested in this particular post don’t have to see it. This will reduce “un-follows” or users getting frustrated from too many marketing posts from a company in one day. Customizing the messages for different groups of your target audience will make the message even more effective.

The bottom line is, although Google+ is just starting out, we predict that this network has a lot of marketing potential and is definitely something to keep an eye on.

If you are new to Facebook, it may be hard for you to understand the difference between the Facebook profile and the Facebook page. The key is to always remember that Facebook profiles are for people, Facebook pages are for artists, businesses, organizations or any other commercial use. This is a very important fact to remember because Facebook has openly stated that it will remove profiles that are acting as business pages.

One of the reasons why many people get confused when they’re trying to establish an online presence using Facebook is because Facebook users must create a profile before they create a page. Although pages and profiles look very similar, there are some big differences between the two. It’s important that when you’re joining Facebook as a business, you create a Local Business Facebook page and use your profile only for your personal use.

Here are some traits of Facebook pages that profiles do not have:

1. People “like” a business page, but “add as friend” for personal profiles. People who “like” your business page are referred to as “fans.” When using a personal profile, people who interact with your page are your “friends.”

2. Your business can “like” other pages but not individual personal profiles.

3. With a business page, you can view statistics about your users and posts from the “Insights” tab. This will help you determine the demographics of your users and what they like so you can keep them engaged.

4. Once you get 25 people to “like” your business page, you can get a custom URL for your page that is easy to remember and promote.

5. Your Facebook page can have more than one administrator. This allows both you and your employees to contribute to the Facebook page (if desired).

6. As an administrator of your Facebook page, you can suggest the page to all of your Facebook friends.

Facebook pages are meant for interacting and connecting with your fans (who are also your current and potential customers). Remember to save your personal posts for your profile and your engaging business-related posts for your page.

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