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5 Easy Ways to Get Started On 5 Different Social Networks
Mar 29th
Let’s face it, there are a lot of social networks out there and more are popping up every day. For a small business owner, that can get a little intimidating. If only there was an easy way to start getting involved in each. One little thing or activity that could help spur a future of more engaged results and interaction.
Why not start right here?
Below are five ways to ease your way into five different social networks.
1. Twitter
Twitter is a great platform for small business owners who need to get their message out there, but don’t necessarily have the resources to do it through more traditional channels. Twitter can get you that network by investing time, not dollars. Each time you send a tweet it’s blasted out to the people in your network, who then have the ability to share your content with their unique network and so on. The stronger the network that you build, the greater potential reach for your content.
So where do you start? By building a local audience. How?
Start listening to the keyword-related conversations happening 15-, 25-, maybe even 50-miles you’re your brick and mortar location. By using’s Twitter’s Advanced Search to search [keywords + zip code] you can easily find these conversations as they’re happening. If you’re a local car mechanic, use this search to find the people within driving range who are experiencing car trouble. Follow them and reach out.
Use Twitter Directories like WeFollow, Twellow and Tweepz to identify other local Twitter users. Once you’re able to create a list of people in your area who would benefit from your service, Twitter becomes a much more relevant place to spend your time.
2. Flickr
Flickr isn’t as hyped as some of the other social platforms but it’s still one you should be paying attention to. As a SMB, using images gives you the opportunity to represent your business in a more personal way and connects you to people uber-passionate about the topics they talk about.
So where do you start? By using Flickr Communities to build awareness and authority. How? By joining the discussions happening inside targeted Flickr groups.
For example, say you’re a florist. Do a search for [floral arrangements] and then look through the Groups listed on the right-hand side.
Click into any of those groups to see a list of discussions taking place. This will help you connect with people who are obsessed with flowers or who are talking about different arrangements. By becoming involved in these discussions and the group chats you become the Go To Expert on this subject. And you can bet that the next time one of these community members has an engagement they need a flower arrangement for, you’re going to be on the short list of companies they seek out. It’s all about building those relationships before you need them.
3. Facebook
I’ve always viewed Facebook as a slightly more personal platform than Twitter or LinkedIn, and I don’t think I’m alone. As such, small business owners do best when they use Facebook as a place to let customers peek behind the scenes and bring them into their business. Make Facebook your personal portal where you get to share what you’re working on, what you’re thinking about, and what’s coming for your business.
Where do you start? By inviting customers into your day-to-day. How? By using the Facebook Questions feature.
Use the Questions feature on Facebook to poll your audience on things you have going on. Maybe it’s to ask them their favorite way to use your product or what product they’d like to see, or what color they’d like to see it in – just get them talking and engaging. Because Facebook likes this type of interactive content, you’ll notice that anything posted through the Questions feature will naturally get more visibility than a simple Facebook status. More visibility begets more engagement which will increase your EdgeRank score and help lift up the rest of your content.
4. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is another social network that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. The power of LinkedIn for a small business owner is its ability to connect you with the right people to help you build your business. This includes potential new employees, vendors, partners, and other people you simply want to meet.
Where do you start? Again, by building that local network before you need it. How do you do it? By leveraging common connections.
Start off by creating a list of people (or types of people) that you want to meet/get introductions to. Then, use LinkedIn’s Advanced Search to search for the types of people you want to meet.
For example:
- [vendor + keyword + zip code]
- [employee skill + zip code]
- [company name + zip code + 2nd connections]
Doing these types of search will allow you to find that accounting vendor you’re looking for or a representative from Company X who you share a mutual connection with. By reaching out to your common friend, it can help you score the introduction and a new possible relationship. Using LinkedIn’s searching capabilities is a great way to strategically meet people and grow your business.
5. Google+
The strongest marketing component from Google+, IMO, comes in the ability to segment content via user-defined Circles. As a marketer and a business owner in the tech space, I love that I have one portal I can use to talk to ALL of my business contacts and do it in a way that is targeted to their needs.
How do you start? By creating and optimizing your Circles. How? By bucketing your connections.
Take advantage of the Circles functionality by putting some thought into how you bucket your contacts. For example, you may want to classify people by:
- Customers
- Colleagues
- Frequent Blog Commenters/Social Engagers
- Vendors
- Local Community Folks
- Client Wishlist
Once you have your Circles intact, you can start creating content that is customized for these groups. You can turn your Blog Commenters Circle into a makeshift idea forum where you “test out” potential blog post ideas to see if they spark a conversation. You can use your Vendor circle as a way to create a company newsletter to let them know what you’re working in and get input about how their product can help you. Once you have your Circles down you can become a whole lot more strategic with your content, while still housing it all on one platform.
While the sheer number of social networks may be intimidating, the trick is to identify a solid purpose for each and to then hop in and make that platform useful. Hopefully the list above will give you some ideas about common launch points.
5 Easy Ways to Get Started On 5 Different Social Networks
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Manta Adds Social Connections to Online Business Community
Mar 28th
Manta, an online community of small businesses, has added Social Connections features for its members, which help small businesses grow their referral networks. The enhanced offerings are designed to help small business owners manage their online reputations by increasing engagement with Manta members. The main components of the new features are that they allow users to recommend a company as well as follow a company they have a connection with.
Manta, which was launched in 2005, and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, has more than one million registered users and 87 million company profiles, business owners and professionals. Initially, it was designed to become a “search destination for premium sources of business intelligence available via a pay-per-view sales model,” but in 2007, the company was thriving by offering detailed company information on small businesses. More than 22 million unique global small business owners and enterprises use Manta each month.
The Power of Referrals
Manta conducted a survey of 1,000 small business owners and found that 78% of them asked for recommendations, and 60% have given them for other businesses. Manta’s new social tools allow users to create recommendations for companies on Manta’s business listings. Companies have control over which recommendations appear on their company page.
“Unlike the traditional rating and review sites which have a very consumer-focused offering, Manta’s recommendations are business-focused and can be controlled by the business owner, allowing them to better manage their online reputation,” said Pamela Springer, CEO of Manta, “While some networks cater to individuals to help manage their career or others who help connect with family and friends, Manta is the only community dedicated entirely to helping SMBs market and grow their business.”
“Follow this Company” Feature
Another component of Manta’s Social Connections is the ability of users to follow companies they are interested in. Members can follow companies where they have worked, or organizations that they have been members of. Small businesses can also follow other businesses. Any notifications the business posts will automatically appear on the follower’s profile.
Manta’s new social component is indicative of more business sites jumping on the social bandwagon. The more interactive and engaging a business site is, the stickier it becomes, and the more traffic it draws.
Manta Adds Social Connections to Online Business Community
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Social Media Still Fuels Small Business
Mar 21st
Social media is still vital to small businesses. Even companies we might not at first think of as candidates for social media marketing can use social networking tools in surprising ways. Here is a look at why social media is good for small ventures and at how to use it effectively in yours.
Social Media Startup
Can social media help you grow faster? A research report suggests tech-savvy companies including those making good use of social media can grow much faster and add more jobs than their less tech-oriented competitors. WSJ
Reasons to get started today. If you’ve waited to get involved in social media for any or all of the following reasons, it’s time to alter your strategy. Here are myths that should be dispelled about social media and your business. Entrepreneur
Tips & Tools
25 tips for social media use. 25 experts in the field share their thoughts on using social media effectively for your small business. What are the most important ways to improve your strategy? Fans Bridge
Having too much of a good thing. Social media truly is a powerful tool for growing your business in many ways, but with great power comes great responsibility. Be careful not to abuse it. Resonance
New cloud-based app boosts social presence. Check out the release on Beam Social, a new cloud-based social media tool aimed at helping small businesses broaden their marketing presence for a fee. MarketWatch
Pinterest Basics
Pinterest tips for small business. Pinterest is a new social media platform your small business should really get to know. If you haven’t yet figured out how to use this new social media tool to your advantage, look no further. Here are some tips to help. Small Business Bonfire
Is Pinterest for you (Infographic)? Of course, before trying to figure out how to do it well, it might be wise for small businesses to decide whether Pinterest is even worthwhile. Not all businesses will benefit, so here are some considerations. Forbes
Rules of Engagement
Marketing through conversation. Using social media for your small business isn’t enough, especially if all you do is put out a marketing message out to your community without ever really listening to what they have to say to you. Here are some ideas to take things to the next level. Ideabloke
Ambient social networking. Ambient social networking is a new trend in social media your small business should be looking into. The new move links social and mobile trends in new ways that should be on your business’s radar today. E-Marketing Associates
Training Tips
Boot camps will get you in shape. If you feel you need that extra something to be ready for the social media challenge, a social media boot camp might be one option. Here is one such event for small businesses offered by IBM. ITJungle
Social Media Still Fuels Small Business
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Why Social Search Is Rotting Our Brain
Mar 14th
Why Social Search Is Rotting Our Brain
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
One of the things that I both loved and hated about the early days of search was that you would inadvertently stumble on to things you didn’t intend to find.
The results were sketchy sometimes and even humorous other times, but you would quite often learn something new quite by accident.
Today, with the reliance and dependability of search, we pretty much get exactly what Google thinks we are looking for – and I think that’s a problem.
The ramping of this idea of “social search” or giving us results based on where we’ve been before, where we are now, who we know and what our friends have +1’d is leading us further down the path where no real learning or discovery is even possible. (And this is not just if you click the social search icon, you can’t turn some elements of this off anymore.)
This idea doesn’t end with search either, it’s in news feeds and personalized results from places like Facebook as well.
The digital and social world has created an entire generation addicted to top 10 highlights, featured news snacks and stuff your friends have pinned.
Look, I know I’m as immersed in this world as any, but I think we’ve gone so far that it’s time to come back a bit – how about a search engine of that would take me to places I’ve never discovered?
I read a USAToday article recently (the original snack publication) that said colleges were concerned with the fact that attendance at college basketball games was down sharply. That seems odd given all the March Madness hype, media coverage and total fascination with being in the game no matter how much the tickets cost.
When the journalist writing the story dug into the statistics he found that most of retreat in attendance was from students enrolled in the colleges, even though in some cases student fees covered their tickets. When asked, many of college students admitted they found the highlights, tweets and video coverage a much better way to consume the content – which makes me wonder if we could just condense everything to highlights and not really ever play the real game or write the real book.
What personalized search is doing is giving people what they want and it’s turning the web, our link to entire planet of ideas and thought, into a tool that ensures we will never receive another original thought again. Into a tool that forces bite sized popular ideas onto our plate. And, into a tool that makes certain that only what our so-called friends purchase, do and say is relevant.
I talked to a researcher recently that said he was studying a group of 20 somethings and one of the questions was to identify how much time they spent online. He had to change the question because they didn’t know what he meant. Their online time was so omnipresent that they could no longer make a distinction between being online and not.
This is not going away and my guess is it will become even more pervasive, because, hey, that’s what we want, right?
Google and Facebook and every other tool that provides information doesn’t really care that you can’t see this going on and to me that’s the scary part. You’re no longer in charge of what you discover unless you take charge.
To me the new master skill is undiscovery of what you already know and this is quickly turning into something you’ll have to intentionally practice as we live our lives more and more fully online.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Lauren Vargas of Aetna: Becoming A Social Organization
Mar 2nd
It’s clear that these days, customer service is taking place online in arenas such as Twitter, community forums, and Facebook to name just a few. For certain industries, however, this is a whole new world – one that they’re not familiar with or used to exploring and interacting in. So what’s a company in this situation to do? In this interview, Lauren Vargas of Aetna joins Brent Leary to discuss the concept of becoming a social organization and the importance of measuring the health of your community.
* * * * *
Small Business Trends: Can you give us a little bit of your background?
Lauren Vargas: I started out my training through traditional public relations. I was really thankful at that time to have a great CMO at the Department of Defense, at the Air Force Exchange Service, who let me explore social media and what it meant for the military. I was able to deploy a lot of the community strategies that I have tweaked over the last seven years, starting with the Army and Air Force Exchange Service through to Radian6, where I was the director of community.
Now I am with Aetna and we are really starting from the ground up and developing communities, figuring out how a regulated industry participates in already existing communities, sparks conversations, answers customer service questions, and truly becomes a social organization that really participates in this space and becomes a community member itself.
Small Business Trends: What is the difference between growing a community, when you were at Radian6 a couple of years, and starting a community now?
Lauren Vargas: In general, Radian6 had a lot of momentum behind it. It had a lot of tech savvy people willing to get out into the space, knowing that the game was being played online vs. Aetna, which I think is a really innovated company, but they are coming at innovation in various other ways.
Having the boundaries between the organization and the communities really broken down is very different for companies like Aetna. You’re really participating in real time conversations. And in a regulated environment, for a corporation that has been very scripted, very organized, very process driven, this is new. It is a culture shift.
Small Business Trends: What are the biggest challenges, when it comes to a company like Aetna, for being able to put together a community strategy?
Lauren Vargas: Aetna definitely has a multitude of different stockholders and the constituents have various levels of how they can consume information. This is a very process driven company so you have got to start there. Identifying all of the policies and processes that currently exist; what needs to be created and fill that sand box so that people can feel that they are creating and they are empowered in that they know exactly where the boundaries are.
I think that one of the biggest myths for regulated industries, no matter if it’s financial or health, military or government, is that there are so many restrictions that you cannot participate in the space. I do not think that it is necessary or truthful at all. I think as long as you understand the regulations that you must abide by, outline your sand box, the sky is the limit. It’s just that you have to go with those boundaries – and then you can have a fun time playing in that sand box.
Small Business Trends: How important is it for traditional companies to really embrace this whole idea of community?
Lauren Vargas: I think it is incredibly important. The organization needs to embrace various levels of community participation and community feedback.
Social media cannot be a silo; it cannot be relegated to a PR department. At an organization like Aetna, there are so many different communities that we need to participate in, that are already talking about us or talking about health care conversations. We have to spread that social love across the entire organization and we really have to start getting away from a traditional mindset of ‘we build it and they will come’ or that everything has to be scripted and very buttoned down.
Small Business Trends: You are the first person I heard using the term “community health index.” What does that mean?
Lauren Vargas: I figured out the way to put community in perspective is to look at it in four different pillars. The first is branding/engagement which is pretty self-explanatory. This is usually where companies start and stop when it comes to measuring their social presence.
The second pillar is industry engagement. These are all of the conversations, such as your event participation, and the shared conversations that are happening outside of the direct mention of your product, brand, service or organization.
The third pillar is content duration and creation. You really have to figure out what works for your community and where your community is participating, and how they are sharing and responding, and what that impact is on both the duration process and the content creation of the process.
The fourth and final pillar is internal engagement. This comes before you have any type of external participation. Whether you have an exclusive community or you are looking at the community as being a group of topic based conversations. It is often overlooked because everybody just assumed that you create a social presence and everything will be fine.
In each pillar there are 3 to 5 metrics and each has its own weight. Then you average those metrics together to get the pillar weight percentage. Each pillar has its own weighted percentage. You average the four pillars together and you come up with your community health index. That way you can look from a macro to micro standpoint to help the community understand what is moving the needle and what is driving participation.
There is no cookie cutter approach to determining metrics and it really depends on what your business goals are. That is really going to drive whether you are looking at sentiment, the number of downloads, conversion rate, issue resolution types, and other various different metrics.
Small Business Trends: Where can people go on line to learn?
Lauren Vargas: You can follow me on Twitter at @vargasl. Or you can visit some of the posts and explore the conversations and topics in more depth by going to RootReport.com.
This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.
Whether you’re growing your business or starting a new venture, BlackBerry solutions provide you with the freedom you want and the control you need. [Series sponsor]
Lauren Vargas of Aetna: Becoming A Social Organization
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Social Media Will Change Your Business
Feb 26th
Social media will change your business. If you doubt it, just look at the experience others have had. There are several ways to approach the use of social media for your business and many ways it can benefit you. Let’s look at some of the ways others are putting social media to work for them.
Trends
Going to war! It may not sound like we’re talking about business at all here, but setting up a “war room” simply describes a party where you bring some friends over and spend some time getting your company or message noticed by online influencers. eVenues Blog
Social media goes mainstream. Small businesses in just about every community these days are learning the power and value of social media. Is your small business aware of the benefits social media can bring you? BerksmontNews.com
Training
SCORE now offers social media training. This St. Louis chapter has definitely jumped onto the bandwagon. Do your local small business organizations offer training in social media use to local small businesses? If not, what would motivate them to start? Virtual Strategy Magazine
Tips for tourism business. Tourism businesses are learning about social media as well and tying its power in with tools like Google Maps for an unbeatable combination that promotes businesses where they are on the social Web. Do you have a tourism or other location-based business you could market with social media? Fredericksburg.com
Events
Building your business. Blogging can be a great way to build your business. Join us for a special BizSugar Facebook Q & A on Monday, February 27th, from 4:30 to 5:30 pm EST with Ileane Smith of “Basic Blogging Tips.” BizSugar Blog
Tools
Little known tools your business needs. Here are 17 social media tools your small business will not want to do without. The recommendations come from a social media expert whose small business clients have used them successfully and noted that they made a real difference. KissMetrics
Legal
Benefits and risks. A new podcast explores the benefits and risks of using social media for your business. “Opting out” of social media use is probably not an option for your small business, but be aware of some of the risks of participating. ACE Group
Next Generation
A whole new thing. Small businesses have not only discovered Pinterest, but they are using the new bulletin board inspired social media platform to promote their brands. Are you using Pinterest for your small business? USA Today
How do you use Google+? How are your competitors using it? Google+ is a new tool still growing in the social media space. But the ways small to medium sized businesses are using the new platform differ. You’re the Boss
Marketing
Twitter adds new dimension. Small businesses will now be able to advertise on the Twitter platform, an opportunity previously reserved for Fortune 500 companies. The changes come with a more user friendly ad platform and other features. The Boston Globe
Social Media Will Change Your Business
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Where Social Media Jobs Are
Feb 22nd
A few years ago, we couldn’t have imagined that there would be actual jobs for people to “play” on Twitter all day. And yet, an entire category of employment has sprung up around Internet Marketing and Social Media. This infographic by Onward Search looks at where social media roles are, as well as what they’re paying.
The Jobs
We’re starting to have some consistency as far as job titles for social media roles, though many times, sales, marketing, PR and social media bleed into one another. According to the infographic, these are some of the more popular job titles:
- Social Media Strategist or Specialist
- Brand Manager
- Online Community Manager
- Marketing Manager
- Content Writer
Where the Jobs Are
Not surprisingly, social media jobs are primarily found in larger cities, like New York City, Miami, LA and the Silicon Valley. I suspect there are a lot more of these roles that are held virtually throughout the nation, but there’s no data on that as this infographic looks at the top 20 markets for social media jobs.
What did surprise me about the data is the wide range of salaries across the country (and even in the same city). For example, a Social Media Strategist would start at $36,000 in Phoenix, and cap out around $68,000. But in New York City (yes, where the cost of living is higher) the range for this role is $55,000-$103,000. I suspect the ranges would reveal a fresh grad who’s been using social media for personal entertainment for years at the lower end of the scale, as well as a seasoned marketing and advertising professional with a solid understanding of strategy and execution at the upper end.
The best paying social media job? A Social Media Marketing Manager in San Jose, California can make as much as $117,000. It might be time to consider that move to the Valley, eh?
I’d be interested to compare the roles and responsibilities of one position at a lower salary range in one city to a higher salary in another. I’m curious whether the increase in salary is completely about cost of living, or if the roles demand more work.
I’d also love to see data on full time versus part time or freelance, as many of us who work in social media and marketing do so on a retainer or hourly basis, as our clients don’t have the need for a full-time social media staffer.
What I take away from this data is that social media isn’t going anywhere. Companies recognize that they must invest in social media at some level, and are carving out roles to do so.
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Buffer Prevents Social Sharing Overload
Feb 21st
For many social media users, we read articles and blog posts first thing in the morning. Most of those we’d like to share with our networks, but we don’t want to bombard our contacts with all the content we’ve read. Companies have come up with tools that help us schedule our tweets and status updates, but many still require us choosing a time and date for a post to go live. There needs to be a simpler solution.
That’s what Buffer co-founder Joel Gascoigne (@JoelGascoigne) realized when he encountered this issue. And in 2011, he came up with a tool that allowed users to stagger their social media updates throughout the day in preselected time slots. To date, Buffer (@bufferapp) has about 120,000 users, and is growing by 30% monthly.
But the service isn’t just about making social media sharing easier. According to co-founder Leonhard Widrich (@LeoWid), using Buffer can increase clicks of links:
“We took 1 million Tweets sent via Buffer and wanted to find out how Buffer would improve performance. The key result was that anyone starting to use Buffer, would increase the number of clicks on their links by 200%, they would double the number of retweets and increase their Klout score by 3.5 points within 3 weeks. This was very powerful to learn.”
What’s in it for Small Businesses?
Using a tool like this to keep your social media stream steadily pumping out content is not only a time saver, but it also helps you connect with your social media contacts by providing useful articles and links. There are a few ways you can Buffer a website or a status update:
1. Log into your Dashboard and type in an update. Choose the “Buffer” option, which sets your update aside until your next scheduled status update slot.
2. Install a browser extension for Chrome, Safari or Firefox. When you visit a page you want to share with your network, click the Buffer button.
3. Find sites that have the Buffer button installed (similar to the other AddThis or Share buttons on blog posts) and click to share. There are currently 3,000 blogs that use the Buffer button.
You can get analytics on each update, and see how large your potential reach was, how many people retweeted it and how many people clicked the link.
Currently Buffer supports Twitter and Facebook accounts, but Widrich says LinkedIn offerings are around the corner, and the company hopes to add Google + and Pinterest as well. Currently users can Buffer from iPad, iPhone and Android based phones as well. Buffer offers a free account that lets users manage one Twitter and one Facebook account, and hold up to 10 posts in the Buffer. After that, plans start at $10 a month.
Buffer Prevents Social Sharing Overload
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Fanminder Throws in a Dash of Social and Raises $1Million
Feb 18th
Long have we small business owners been accustomed to figuring things out ourselves, whether we’ve got the skills to do them or not. For me, HTML, photo editing and a dabble of design come to mind. In the past, we didn’t have the tools we needed (nor the tools that big companies and big budgets can buy) to help us on our way to growing our businesses.
Now we’ve got a deluge of help: from daily deal sites ready to help us get more foot traffic to social media page creators that require no technical expertise, we’re armed with tools that attempt to make our work easier.
Fanminder, which originally began in 2009 as a tool to help business owners connect with customers through mobile messaging, recently launched its Version 2.0 to include social media and templates to help small business owners reach their customers — wherever they are. See screenshot above showing new social features.
“[Version] 2.0 fills in a big, unmet merchant need to take all those Facebook fans, email lists, mobile lists and Twitter followers and figure out what content actually motivates them to get them to come back to the store to buy something again,” says Paul Rosenfeld, Co-Founder and CEO of Fanminder.
What It Does
Fanminder users can create special offers, mobile coupons and giveaways and distribute them through mobile messaging, social media or email. Fanminder strives to help users create their offers in two minutes or less by offering a gallery of templates to use. There are templates for holidays, special events and typical customer communications that can be modified by the user.
“We’ve always known how much owners want to look bigger than they are, look more professional,” explains Rosenfeld. The professionally designed templates help small business owners give the appearance of being larger, yet at a fraction of the cost of hiring a designer to create them.
And speaking of pricing: there’s no fee to create custom Facebook Pages, create mobile coupons, or send text offers to up to 100 fans. Beyond that, monthly packages start at $50 a month.
From Online to In Store
Something many small businesses have been struggling with is translating social media traffic to foot traffic in a brick-and-mortar store. We fought to get social media followers, and now that we have a surge of them, many of us don’t know how to get customers in person.
“That social media momentum has created consumers who spend an enormous amount of their online time on Facebook,” said Rosenfeld, “Merchants need to go where their customers are and our mission is to bring those customers back into the store.
$1 Million Backing to Address the Trend
This effort to converge the information and campaigns related to all your customers and social media followers has become a major movement among technology providers. We’ve seen it with email marketing services and CRM providers. Fanminder is an example of the mobile marketers who see this as a key step in their evolution.
Fanminder recently announced that it had received $1Million in backing from Keith Rabois, COO of Square and a brain trust of six former Intuit executives including Peter Karpas, the former CMO of Intuit and current VP of Marketing at PayPal; Cary Rosenzweig, the former General Manager of Intuit Payroll Services and current CEO of IMVU; and Steve Grey, the former Director, Strategy of Intuit Merchant Services and current Executive Director of 58.
Fanminder Throws in a Dash of Social and Raises $1Million
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
5 Ways to Use Social Media and Your Online Presence to Drive People Offline
Feb 15th
5 Ways to Use Social Media and Your Online Presence to Drive People Offline
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
No matter what your business sells, how it sells it or how and where people buy you it, people are going online to find it, pure and simple. That’s as true for those one of kind hand made earrings as it is for the spa and auto repair shop in their neighborhood.
Explore The Bruce via Flickr
And, it’s increasingly true for the local insurance provider, landscaper, plumber, attorney and tax professional.
So, what does this mean for the local small business? You’ve got to start thinking about your online presence as a central tool for driving people offline and into your store, sales presentation, meeting, demonstration, appointment or evaluation.
Below are five ways to think about your online activity as an offline opportunity generator.
1) Online calls to action
When people do find and visit your site make it easy for them to use your website to get a free pass, coupon or trial product.
Enable tools like click to call or chat from Olark, so they can get in touch right now and get their burning questions asked
Put a tool like GenBook on your site they can find a time and schedule appointment without needing to call.
Make sure that you have turn by turn directions and links to maps so they can find your business and even send the directions to their smart phone.
2) O2O advertising
Most people run ads to get people buy, what if you thought about your online advertising as a way to simple drive people offline – O2O?
Create local campaigns using Google Adwords that drive people to your website to take advantage of the calls to action, such a the free pass or coupon, that I discussed in the previous point.
Make sure that your Google Places page is complete and compelling and consider the coupon and advertising options available for this tool.
Look into Facebook targeted ads for your calls to action. You can target local Facebook folks all the way down to targeting fans of your competitors.
To make your O2O advertising even more effective create local landing pages for each campaign or even neighborhood you are targeting.
3) Networked networking
Offline networking is still a great way to create and build potential relationships, but you can really amplify this tactic when you add some simple online tactics to your networking efforts.
When you connect offline with a prospect at say a Chamber event, move to also connect online and watch how much faster you can build a relationship.
Employ Social CRM tools like Rapportive or Nimble so you can easily connect the social profiles of anyone you meet to their record. This will make it much easier to learn how to connect.
Look at tools like MeetUp that make it easy to create offline events and gatherings using an online marketing system.
4) Local social groups
Most social networks give you the ability to create groups. Some organizations have had tremendous success by creating and facilitating local, special interest groups on networks like LinkedIn.
The key here is to think “interest group” and not something that’s clearly a promotional tool for your business. If you can create an industry group or some other niche topic that allows your customers to explore and expand an interest they have, you’ve hit on a formula that’s very potent.
5) Online and on the go
Increasingly, our prospects are not only online they are mobile while doing so. There are some very creative ways to take advantage of this fact and drive people with great buying intent offline.
First off make sure you claim your location on sites like Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. This way you can enhance the details and make sure people using geo location services can check in at the right place.
Create and test an offer on a service like Foursquare that can help highlight your business when someone checks in at another nearby business.
Look into the group coupon tools like Groupon, Google Offers or Living Social, but make sure you’re ready to capture the leads these programs produce in a way that allows you to turn a low profit sale into a long term customer.
Think about ways to create check-in games that you could use as part of a promotion. Get a group of strategic partners to participate and offers special deals for people that have checked in at a number of your partners on Foursquare of that take a photo of their purchases at a number of partners and posted it to Twitter or Instagram.
As you can see, the way you can employ this kind of thinking is limited only to your imagination, but there’s no denying the importance and effectiveness of this strategy.
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