Whenever I help a company with a digital or social media strategy, we spend a lot of time defining the business and understanding their customers. Why? Because understanding your customers is vital to the success of any marketing strategy, online or off. Who your customers are, what they care about, what their needs are all dictate how you should be using social media in order to engage and have conversations. Any type of marketing is more effective if you’re reaching the right people with the right message in the right places. Understanding your customers will help you be more effective in your social media strategy and increase engagement with the right people.
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Dec
16
2010
Indicators of Increasing Brand Loyalty in Social Media
Yesterday’s post dealt with using social media to increase brand loyalty. But how do you know if what you’re doing is working? It can be challenging to measure brand loyalty since it often hides amongst other activities like engagement and plain old interest in your content. Unfortunately, there’s not a metric that points completely to brand loyalty, but there are a few indicators that you’re on the right path.
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Dec
09
2010
Identifying 7 of the Most Important People in Your Social Network [updated]
The whole point of using social media is to build relationships with the right people. In your social network there are probably people who help you out in different ways. Recognizing these people and how they are helping you can help you expand these relationships for the benefit of everyone. Here are 6 of the most important people in your social network, and how they can help:
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Oct
22
2010
Building Relationships by Commenting
Commenting on blogs, posts, videos, and others types of content is a great way to build relationships, not only with the content producers, but also others who see the content. However, treating comments as link bait (commenting just to get people to click on your link), can have just the opposite effect. Such comments can actually hurt you in the long run (plus most blogs and websites have do-not-follow rules for links in comments). Build successful relationships via comments with these tactics…
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Oct
19
2010
Klout Adds Facebook to Influence Measurement
Klout recently added Facebook into its influence measurement (which previously was looking mostly at Twitter). Even after recalculating my Klout score from time to time, it didn’t move from my initial score until I added in my Facebook profile. The Facebook integration still doesn’t look at any fan pages (just your profile), but does provide some useful information. After my previous review, my complaint about Klout using only bit.ly’s data for clicks on links is still an issue — if you don’t happen to use bit.ly to shorten your links, Klout has no data about them, and this may negatively affect your influence score. Let’s look at what information the Facebook integration has added….
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Oct
06
2010
5 Tips for Protecting Your Privacy on Facebook
Everyone is on Facebook — so is everyone’s business (and mother and aunts, etc.) Connecting with your business network on Facebook is nice, but not everyone wants to mix personal and professional. There are some ways you can segment who gets to see what, so you’re not sharing your spring break pics with your business contacts, but can still keep in touch with your family.
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Sep
24
2010
How-to: Use Netvibes for Social Media Monitoring
Keeping track of everything that’s going on can be a challenge — especially with social media which moves at the speed of light. Netvibes is a great way to get an eyeball on what’s going on, all in one dashboard. Plus, it’s super easy to set up and also offers customization options if the default isn’t quite what you want. Better yet, you can easily setup a dashboard for each subject you want to monitor, making it simple to switch between. Here’s how to setup Netvibes for your own social media monitoring…
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Sep
08
2010
Social Media in an Hour a Day
You’re busy. You’re trying to run your business and you probably are wearing multiple-hats — marketing, accounting, sales, operations, etc. You want to use social media, but you don’t have a lot of time to spare. While social media can take a lot of time, you can get quite a bit out of it just by devoting an hour a day. Here’s how…
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Sep
02
2010
8 Ways to Increase Social Media Interaction
If you’re just getting started with social media, it can be very frustrating if you’re not getting a lot of interaction. You may feel like you’re putting a lot of effort into creating great content and no one is responding. Unfortunately there isn’t a magic wand that can make you instantly Internet popular, but here are some tips for improving your interaction and getting on the right path.
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Aug
26
2010
Is Social Media a Waste of Time?
Ahh, social media. The golden ticket to increased profits and a life time of wealth. All you have to do is setup a Twitter and Facebook profile and start sending updates and magically people will start following and responding to you.
If you believe this, you’ve been lead down the wrong path. While social media may cost less than other marketing methods, it still requires planning, time and patience. If you just jump in without knowing what you’re doing and what you’re trying to accomplish, you may not get the results you expected, leading you to believe it’s all a huge waste of time.
Digital Marketing & Strategy
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