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Around 2009, small business followed the lead of big businesses and created pages on social network sites right and left. They might have heard somewhere on the Internet that social network is a great way to reach customers and profiles are free to set up, so why not?

A lot of those pages are graveyards now. They haven’t been updated in months and almost nobody Likes them. They didn’t even get a very good response when they were active.

A lot of businesses gave up once they didn’t see a surge in new customers, but no form of advertising can do that for very little work. Everything worth anything takes time and effort, and companies forgot that because they expected social network profiles to provide instant rewards with little effort. Social network requires effort just like any other form of marketing outreach, so how can you improve your social network marketing campaign?

Put some time into it

Casually telling your friends to Like your company page on Facebook won’t cut it. A few of their friends might see posts about your company, but social networks is all about contacting highly targetable customers.

Run an advertising campaign

Let’s say you run an insurance brokerage that sells medical insurance locally. Social networks like Facebook allow you to run targeted ads based on demographics, people’s interests, and even pages that people Like. You can make an ad that is directed toward people who Like, say, pages relating to medical insurance, or healthcare reform. Or, you can go even narrower and make an ad for health insurance with an orthopodic addendum that’s aimed at people who are in Facebook groups about foot health problems.

Social media monitoring

Most social networks have analytics tools that let you see the effectiveness of your advertising in terms of how many people click on your ads, but that’s where they stop. You aren’t able to find out whether or not people are talking about your company or your products. That’s why companies like Alerti offer social media monitoring services to let your company know what people are saying about you online, both on social networks and other forms of social media, like blogs.

Measure your success early

When you run a traditional advertising campaign, you have to wait weeks or more to see if you’re getting good results. Even AdSense campaigns take a while to get accurate results since the variance is so high and Google likes to show campaigns quick results so that they keep buying AdSense ads. However, social media monitoring tools let you get results instantly. When you sign up for a service like Alerti, you can see any social media post relating to certain keywords or linking back to certain URL’s. So, if you make a blog post about your company and promote it on social media, you can easily see if people are reposting your post and talking about it online. Furthermore, most social media monitoring tools have analytics that let you see where people are talking about you the most so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the appropriate social networks.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach work for a variety of clients, such as Alerti.

Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• HootSuite
• Bit.ly
• Twitalyzer
• SproutSocial
• PeerIndex
• CoTweet
• Twitter Grader
• Wildfire Analytics
• Klout
• 10 Twitter tools for better social networking (Webdesigner depot)

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This is a guest post by Andy Havard, who is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.

Video blogs are rapidly taking over the blogging world, but many Internet users are still apprehensive about making the transition from text blogging to video blogging. A lot of text bloggers struggle with the idea of getting confident on camera, especially when it’s outside of their traditional blogging comfort zone. The following article explores how you can create confident video blogs on the Internet and enjoy the popularity that ‘vlogging’ is receiving across the web.

1. Always Know What You Are Talking About

The simplest way to appear confident on camera is to know your topic. Make sure you’ve researched your subject area well and even take time to script what you want to say in your video. If you naturally get nervous speaking publicly, then having a solid subject knowledge on the tip of your tongue will minimise the chances of you stumbling on your words. When you know what you’re talking about, you’ll look like you know what you’re talking about too. This will make your video blogs appear very confident and extremely knowledgeable.

2.  Make Sure You Know Your Target Audience

The chances of your vlog getting seen by every Internet user in the world is pretty slim. A lot of on-screen nerves actually comes from vloggers thinking there’s millions of people watching their video. Your real audience will be those interested in the topics and subjects you’re discussing on your video blog, or users familiar with your written blog. This means that you’ll easily be able to find out who the audiences in your niche are and the content they enjoy, which theoretically means you should be of the same disposition. Once you’ve understood the content your audience likes and what they engage with well, you can create your video blogs in the same vain. If you can engage with your audience you’ll make a stronger connection with them and that should in turn help you to get more and more confident on camera.

3. Get Comfortable With The ‘On-Screen’ You

One thing that makes video bloggers lose confidence in themselves is watching their videos back. The way you sound and the way you look to ‘you’ is actually a lot different to the ‘you’ that’s captured on camera. The ‘you’ that appears on camera is the real you and you need to embrace it. Learn the ways you phrase words, notice the intonation and pronunciation in your voice and make note of what you do with your face, hands and body when you talk. By understanding the habits you have when you present yourself on camera you can start to make changes to your performances and become more confident in how you’ll end up looking and sounding on video.

4.  Analyze Your Takes & Videos

Once you’ve become fluent in how you look and sound on screen you can start to make real changes to the way you present your videos. Analyse your takes and final videos, be cut-throat in what works and what doesn’t work. Make note of ideas to try out for your next take or episode and always strive to better yourself. When you start to analyse and criticize your own performances you will be able to better your video blogs every at every turn and gain more confidence as a result.

5.  Practice, Practice, Practice

There’s never a substitute for good, old fashioned practice. Try record one or two videos a day, just for your own benefit. Don’t upload them anywhere, just practice. If you practice one particular video a few times a day you’ll go from having a pretty poor video on Monday to having a fluent, confident and knowledgeable video come Sunday. This will help you to get comfortable with the whole recording process, get you to be more relaxed on camera and help you to make your video seem as confident as possible.

Summary

By following these five pointers you can start to become the confident, professional video blogger you hoped to be and make your video blogs just as popular as your established written blog.

Interview with Sarah Worsham on BSC Designer

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Join dozens of today’s most influential business minds as they share tips and strategies, via on-demand video, to help you grow your business.  Each speaker will share their thoughts via a 5-15 minute video.  The event is free of charge online during the main event dates and is geared specifically for small business owners, entrepreneurs, work-from-home professionals and anyone who is looking to learn and apply strategies to work smarter and increase profits.

My talk is on the importance of setting good business goals and tips on how to set strategies to meet those goals by thinking about how you can measure your progress.

Register today! It’s free and there are some great speakers with useful information you can apply immediately to your business.

Promotions and marketing have evolved very much over the past few years. We have seen the evolution of social media websites, discount businesses, and online incentives for customers. Advances in mobile broadband technology have brought the internet right into the hands of millions of consumers around the globe. Along with these tools, companies have found ways to entice customers to the store more frequently through price reductions, rebates, specials, etc. These new marketing tactics have enhanced sales tremendously for many businesses, even in times of a tough economy. Let’s take a look at the top approaches for marketing locally on a social level.

Facebook

Facebook has made some important changes to the way they involve local businesses in their social network. They hope to better capitalize on the hundreds of millions that update their status every day by incorporating a “location” tag right in the update. Users can not only tell the world what they are doing, but also where they are when they’re doing it. This is a vast improvement over using the now obsolete Places application to “check in” at a given location.

With this simple tag feature, Facebook is looking to get more users involved and excited about the “Where are you?” concept of their social interaction. This benefits businesses tremendously as more and more people go about revealing the restaurants, stores, and social venues they visit every day. Facebook will be able to more easily appeal to businesses that want to be a featured listing on the “location” suggestion box. These businesses can offer discounts to users or simply pay to be a suggested listing.

This is an excellent way to market locally, as companies can leverage Facebook to increase their visibility and sales. When consumers receive deals, they are more likely to shop in your local store. With the Facebook network reaching hundreds of millions of people every day, consumers are able to find the deals that match their interests and instantly update their location through their status update. The more discounts consumers find, the more they will want to shop. This helps to build brand loyalty with consumers that buy your product and like the product. Customer’s friends will also have access to view the deals once they determine where their friend is located. If done properly, a snowball effect will take place and attract an exponential amount of clients to your business.

Foursquare

Foursquare mayorships are similar to Facebook Places former “check ins” option. Since Facebook no longer runs a separate application, Foursquare is the premier “check in” and discounts app. Customers are awarded in Foursquare with free goods and discounts if they check into a business a certain number of times. For instance, you could check in 10 times at Burger Business and get a burger free or drink. The mayor title is offered to customers that visit often. However, employees, owners or managers cannot participate. Rewards may also be given to those in the special management section. Foursquare allows businesses to reward their loyal customers and increase their revenue with repeat business. This also encourages groups of people to converge onto a location at the same time. If you can bring a crowd, some companies will increase your reward.

Groupon

Customers using Groupon can earn discounts by buying with a group of people at once. They can redeem their discounted services or codes by printing out their coupons or by using their mobile phones. This encourages business by offering exclusive incentives to relevant customers within your area. The Groupon coupons allow customers to receive discounted services on salons, massages, dinner, and a lot more. Users enjoy the discounts and may encourage their friends to get free deals. Sometimes if the consumer encourages three or more friends to purchase the deal, they receive theirs free.

Conclusion

Facebook, Foursquare, and Groupon are all excellent marketing tools. Both the consumer and the company benefit tremendously from the use of these coupons. This form of marketing is becoming more successful as more companies attempt to drive new business to their doorstep.

Note: Photo courtesy of marcopako via FlickR Creative Commons.

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1. Industry Publications – Since you probably already read industry publications to keep up with news and events, why not see if there are hot topics that you can cover on your blog or other social media platforms?
2. Influencer Blogs – Most industries have acknowledged and respected experts. What topics are they covered and how can you add your opinion or take?
3. Competitors – If your competitors are producing or curating content, what are they covering? Are there topics where you can add your own spin or additional insight or expertise?
4. Sales & Marketing Training Materials – What sales and marketing materials have you prepared for your own employees? Are there topics that could be of interest to customers (removing confidential information, of course)?
5. Case Studies – Have you had a situation where you learned something that might be useful to your customers? Write up a case study on the situation, what happened, and how it was resolved (bonus for providing data and insights with a good story).
6. Customer Service – What questions and concerns are customers bringing to the company? Can you help ease frustration by providing additional content or information?
7. Social Media – What topics are being discussed already on social media for your industry? Look at the conversations that competitors, industry publications, and customers are having and see how you can help.
8. Conferences & Events – Take a look at the topics that conferences and events are covering (for your industry and for your target customers). Covering an event or conference you attend is another great source of content.
9. Related Topics – Instead of only producing content about your products and services, think about related topics.  If you sell water bottles, think about the activities your customers like to do with the water bottle — exercising, hiking, playing sports, gardening, etc. Figure out what topics your customers are excited about and provide content about those topics.
10. Q & A – Solicit questions from your customers and audience — what questions do they have on the topics you are covering (or on your products)? Answer the questions as content for everyone.
11. Guest Authors – Instead of trying to come up with all the content yourself, see if there are guests who would like the opportunity to write for you (or produce a podcast or video) — it’s a win-win for everyone: you get content without having to produce it yourself, they get in front of your audience (guest authors often help promote their content too).
12. Curation – Another content source is to curate content from other sources. It can take a bit of effort to keep up with everything going on, so people often appreciate when someone else does the hard work of putting links to what’s important in one place.
13. Ask – Stuck trying to figure out what content to produce next? Ask your audience what topics they’d like covered.  If you don’t get a response online, ask people in person. Ask co-workers and colleagues as well.
14. Reviews – When people go to buy a product or service, they often like to do some research first.  Are there products or services within your industry (or within the topics your audience is interested in) that you can review as posts or videos? Similarly, how about asking others to review your products? They can serve as content and as testimonials. (Make sure to disclose any relationships you have with reviewers or organizations, as well as if you received anything for free — or were paid to do the review. Disclosure is required by the FTC).
15. Crowd Sourcing – Ask your audience to contribute content — photos, videos, stories, etc. You can even feature the best every week as a round-up post or create a contest.

What other sources of content do you use in your social media strategy?

(photo by Friar’s Balsam, on Flickr)

Broadcast vs. Participation

Radio, TV, and print (traditional media) are all broadcast mediums — one publisher distributes content out to an audience with very little interaction. Social media is a many to many medium where anyone can be a publisher and where the audience can interact with publishers. Broadcast mediums like print, tv and radio are fine for marketing via advertising because the audience puts up with ads in return for free content (tv shows, music, news, etc.). However, on social media, the audience has a voice in what is published — either by whether or not they even bother looking at it, or by voicing their opinion on the content (or organization). The social aspect means that it’s much more important to take into account your audience’s needs.

Audience Needs vs. Your Needs

Since audiences online have a voice in what is published (and whether they look at it), it becomes vitally important to understand their needs so that you can provide content that fulfills those needs.  If all you do is post promotional messages about how great your organization is, that probably doesn’t fulfill anyone’s needs except your own. People are very selfish. If your content doesn’t fulfill a need, they’ll quickly go somewhere else and never come back (which makes it impossible to market to those people).

Immediacy vs. Long Term Effects

Advertising on traditional media usually provides immediate effects (hopefully, or else you’re not likely to do it again). Participating on social media has less of a monetary investment, but a much larger time investment. If you want people to listen to you and have conversations with you on social media, then you need to be consistent about posting and engaging. The upside is that social media can help you build relationships which have much longer effects than a one-time up-surge in sales.

How does your content make your social media strategy?

(photo by Niko Herlin, on Flickr)

1. Increase Awareness – If you rely entirely on word of mouth referrals, then the only new business you get will be through your current customers. While there’s nothing wrong with growing slowly, and referrals are the best kind of business lead, social media can help make more people aware of your services. If more people are aware of your existence, they’ll be more likely to ask their network about you for recommendations (and may even refer you even if they haven’t used your services).
2. Be More Top-of-Mind – The more often you interact with someone, the more likely it is that you will be considered if someone is in need of your products or services. Likewise, the more interactions someone has had with you, the more likely they will be to consider referring you to their network.  Social media can help you increase interactions with your referral network by connecting with them more often than is possible in person.
3. Increase Reputation – People may not realize just how much you know about your industry or niche if they only have a chance to have one interaction or conversation with you.  Social media gives you the opportunity to consistently help people by answering questions, providing support and creating helpful content which can help improve your reputation as an expert.
4. Improve Customer Service – Every business has customers who have a problem or a question. The more available you are to address problems or questions, the more satisfied people are (even if they initially had a negative experience). People are talking about your business, whether or not you have a social media presence.  Being active on social media gives customers another opportunity to resolve a problem or have a question answered before voice their issues to their network. Even if a problem is posted on a review site or a blog, monitoring for your brand names can help you be aware of these posts so you can reach out to the customer who had a problem and help solve it — people realize that problems arise, but they want to see that a company cares about the customer.
5. Improve Loyalty – The best way to increase referrals from your current customers is to have happy customers who are loyal to your organization. Social media can give you an opportunity to reward loyal customers, while at the same time making that reward obvious to non-customers. Social media can also help you track (and give back) for referrals. For example, Foursquare allows businesses to post offers or specials to customers after so many check-ins (or visits) and it also allows businesses to see who their loyal customers are. Most small businesses know who a lot of their customers are, but it may not always be obvious who they are or how loyal they are.
6. Build Relationships – People buy from people. People are more likely to buy from a company if they know someone there. Social media helps humanize an organization by providing an opportunity for customers to connect one-to-one with an employee. Social media also provides opportunities to continue to build relationships that have been formed in person and/or the opportunity to meet people online that you may later meet in person.

How do you use social media to increase word of mouth referrals for your business?

(photo by coolio-claire, on Flickr)

One of my clients has an eCommerce site, but also has a retail location.  He felt like his efforts to post on social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) weren’t really worth it. He wasn’t seeing an increasing trend in online sales, so to him, social media wasn’t working. However, his use of social media has not been constant (and he’s still learning about engagement versus information vs. promotion). Intuitively, it may seem like lack of consistency and posting on social media may be affecting sales, but it makes more impact to prove it visually.

I plotted the number of posts on social media versus the visits that the ecommerce website was getting from social media and the affect on the number of sales (numbers have been removed, but the scale is 1 to 1):

When you see the numbers plotted visually, there certainly looks to be a pattern. When there is an increase in social media activity (measured just in number of posts by the client), there tends to also be an increase in traffic to the site from social media.  There are also lifts in the number of sales (although they sometimes lag by a month). There may be other marketing efforts affecting sales (including efforts for the retail location), but doing a visual analysis can be helpful in spotting overall trends. (Doing a direct correlation analysis may also be helpful.)

Having dedicated landing pages for specific social media promotions would help to figure out the impact of specific social media tactics. However, there still will be some traffic and sales from people who have interacted with you via social media, but didn’t make an immediate purchase (they come back later).

Marketing isn’t always an exact science, but measurement and trending information can help give insights into the effects of various tactics. Having information about how tactics are performing makes it easier to make good business decisions on how to move forward.

How do you measure how social media activity affects sales?

(photo by borman818, on Flickr)