WSI Marketing, Surf, Search and Social

Facebook is one of the very high traffic social media sites and I am always being asked how to incorporate it into a digital marketing strategy and effectively use it to drive business results. Firstly you need to decide on your social media marketing strategy and see if Facebook is a good fit for your target audience. But let’s assume you have decided to use Facebook; what are the next steps?

Marketing your business on Facebook is just like using any social media site you need to build a presence, then establish credibility and educate your potential customers.

Here are some steps to help you get the most from your Facebook marketing:
It is best to keep your business profile separate from your personal page, so remember everything on your business page should be business related, you can have some fun with it but keep it professional.
Make sure your pages look professional: get some help to reflect the same professional image as on your web site; use the same graphics and colours; maintain your brand image. Consider having a welcome page specifically for new visitors.
Have a plan regarding what you are going to add, and what do you want the visitor to do once they find your page. Why should anyone return to your pages again? How will you react to negative comments?
Create a reason for people to provide their contact details and to pass the page onto their friends, this sort of viral marketing is where Facebook excels.
Remember to interact with others, you need to participate in the dialogue and be visible, keep adding fresh content, and answering questions.
Provide polls or surveys to engage with your audience, ask others to share their ideas and tips.
Keep everyone up to date with your latest offers and initiatives provide a good reason for them to interact with your business.
Consider hiring a professional to create an app and provide it on your page. This can really make your page go viral since fans will share them with their friends, which is all adding to your visibility and credibility.
The main thing is that once you have decided to create a Facebook page for your business you need to be consistent with your efforts and contribute regularly to keep things moving. Why not share some of your ideas in the comments section here to help others utilise Facebook to attract new business.

Get to know what your customers are saying about your brand online and learn what you need to develop an effective social media marketing strategy!

Over the weekend one of my family members asked me a question “What’s the benefits of using Twitter?” I have decided to put a short post together outlining some of them. I mostly use Twitter for researching and to promote my content. Usually when I have written a new post, I post a description with a link of the post I have made.

Find some benefits of using Twitter below:

• Researching: Research industry specific topics. Great way to get topics for new Blog posts;
• Communication Tool: Follow and be followed. Start a conversation;
• Twitter Feed reader: Yep thats right. You can subscribe to the people you are following’s RSS tweet feeds;
• News: People post news topics as they happen. Real time information;
• Recruitment: I follow some of these (http://twitter.com/NewYorkWebJobs);
• For Fun: What are you doing right now? Post it on Twitter and see other people’s responses;
• Competitive Intelligence: Find out what your competitors are up to. Be the spy;
• Engage with your target audience: Tell your Pizza fan club about the new Pizza you have made;
• Build a reputation: Post regularly about your topic;
• Build credibility: Become an expert in your topic;
• Build trust: Keep on doing the above;
• Promote your “content”: Share what you have posted, new website, pizza you have made, etc;
• Promotion: Promote your pizza;
• SEO Boost: Gain traffic to your website, blog, etc;
• Ask Questions: Most searches on the search engines starts with a question. Ask your question to your followers;
• Receive answers: Real time results are the best!;
• Press releases: Post about any press releases;
• Internal communication tool: Tweet that your secretary should come to work now;
• External communication tool: Tweet to your friends that you have been fired;
• For conferences: You can even have a conference on Twitter if you want to;
• Re-enforce Your Brand: Tell the world about your Pizzeria;
• Marketing Opportunities: Promote your pizza special on Wednesdays;
• Networking Opportunities: Maybe someone wants to buy your Pizzeria;

Found a post with 101 Twitter resources that can help you on your Twitter path. Find a couple below:

• My Tweeple – Manage your following and followers.
• The Twitter Blog – Follow their official blog.
• Explore Twitter – Learn more about Twitter.
• Twitter Search - Search in Twitter.
• TwitterVerse – What is Twitter doing lately?
• Tweetmeme – Twitter meme.
• The Twitter Blacklist – Spammers are everywhere. Protect yourself.
• Twitterholic – Shows popular Twitter feeds.
• YouTwit – Put Twitter status on Google maps.
• Twitterberry – Mobile client for Blackberry.
• Email Twitter – Mobile client.
• Twoble – Mobile client for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs.
• TwitterMail – Tweet via email.
• OutTwit – Use Twitter from Outlook.

When used strategically, Twitter can prove to be a very powerful tool in your company’s digital marketing strategy. Visit our site to read more about how social media can build your credibility and reputation online!

What really defines Social Media (Web 2.0)? Is it just the technology or the human side? We usually tend to always talk about the technology that is involved with Web 2.0 such as Blogs, Wikis, RSS, AJAX, Api’s, XML, etc.  Although it is the technology that makes Web 2.0 work, this transformation is really sparked by basic human needs.

Social media/networking is about collaboration, connecting, sharing, interacting and expression. With Web 2.0, the online world is being woven in the social fabric of today’s technology driven lifestyle. Web 1.0 was really more about technology trends and Web 2.0 is about the integration of this technology in the basic needs of our daily business and social lives.

Collaboration

Rather than working all alone, tools like Wiki’s and CMS (Content Management Systems) allows for people to work seamlessly together. Other social media tools allows companies to communicate and develop procedures and policies to collaborate with customers and partners.

Sharing

You don’t have to read a blog, news feed or online magazine alone.  The Web 2.0 web allows for interaction and the sharing of information with others. Sites today allows easy sharing of opinions (blogs), videos, images and even your favourite web links (social bookmarking.

Connecting

The technology tools of social media allows people to interact and connect in their common interests.  Social networking sites allows users to connect and collaborate in real-time.  It’s all about connecting people and developing a network approach to business.

Expressing

Blogging has always been a way for human expression.  People can express their opinions on just about anything.  The web 2.0 spaces such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to name but a few allows for easy expression, representation and participation.

Interacting

People always want human interaction.  Social media has brought in conversational marketing.  Companies now holds a two-way dialogue with their customers through real-time chat, instant messaging and blogs.

Companies that market to small businesses should focus on creating a social media strategy as a way of promoting their services and be open to trying new methods of prospecting. Companies that are marketing to this sector should have a strong presence at the top or on the most relevant social networking sites. Especially since this is an excellent way of getting the word out about your business.

Here are some other ideas that you can add to your digital marketing strategy to try to increase your online visibility:

Product Reviews and Ratings

When someone is deciding whether to buy something online they will nearly always look for reviews or testimonials; they provide great input to the decision making process. Make sure prospects will find great reviews of your products or services.

Podcasts and Webinars

This year has seen a dramatic increase in the use of podcasts and webinars as a way of educating your prospects as more and more managers are looking online for information. Small business owners consider these as great resources for their professional development and research. They are also not time consuming, so you are more likely to get someone to listen to a short webinar than to agree to an in person meeting.

Social Media Company and Brand pages

Creating a great image on the social media sites is now a necessity for most small businesses, but make sure you also include some educational resources. Try to answer the most common questions your company is asked as a part of the profile page. Also consider adding some presentation materials; this is easily done using SlideShare which can be added to your LinkedIn profile, and optimized for search.

Company Blogs

A well written company blog can have a big impact, but this does involve a commitment to keep on creating additional content. So make sure you have a plan for this before you start one. You need both the content strategy and resources necessary to create and maintain a good one.

All of these activities act to engage decision makers in your business or brand and can set your company apart from the local competition.

To keep up-to-speed with the evolving social media technologies and techniques of today, take a look at our Social Media Strategy Kit.

Do you have a company presentation? You can use SlideShare to get the message out about your business. SlideShare provides tools and web space for publishing your business presentations online.

An astonishing 25 million website visitors – most of them professional people – participate in SlideShare every month, making it ‘the world’s largest community for sharing presentations‘.

How Can SlideShare Help you?

Participating as part of the SlideShare community enables you to upload, enhance and share your slides, and discuss other PowerPoint, PDF and Open Office presentations with like-minded people.

The purpose-built online sharing tools allow presentations to be shared privately (for internal use only), as well as publicly, with the aim of eliciting some social interaction from your target audience.

Getting Your Message Heard
Spreading your sales message across multiple web platforms is part of an effective Web 2.0 marketing strategy. With this is mind, you can use SlideShare to help:

• Upload your company presentation to share with new and existing customers
• Publish tutorials about your products to enhance your support services
• Share slides from business presentations as a means of reference and promotion
• Develop conversations with other businesses that relate to your industry
• Add insightful comments to enhance other presentations in your niche

To bring an extra dimension to your presentations, SlideShare tools allow you to synchronize audio with your slides. Once a presentation is viewed, the user interface provides all the usual methods of sharing content across the web that millions of web users are now accustomed to just as in YouTube.

Making New Connections
As well as publishing your own materials, use the SlideShare search tool to find other presentations that relate to your target market – or simply to locate topics that interest you. Make comments and contribute genuinely to enhance the presenter’s message.

As part of the SlideShare community you can join and create groups related to your areas of interest. Monitoring groups will allow you to hone in on who will be most compatible with your interests. It will also give you a feel for the tone to take when you first make contact.

Presentation Tips
Adopting a professional but simple approach to preparing your business presentations will enable you to publish short, succinct and memorable marketing messages. With this in mind, here are some tips:

• Be creative with your copy – not with ‘wizzy’ effects
• Keep the presentation style simple – a light colour background for your slides is ideal
• If you are using images, optimize them so the slides load immediately
• Keep your messages short and to the point
• Consider adding some personality – it is a social networking site, after all
• Don’t overwhelm the viewer with facts and figures; use them to enhance your message, not as your message.

Additionally, if you use business presentations, you may want to consider dusting them off and publishing them on the web.

There are many more digital marketing techniques like this that will help your business gain exposure and drive growth online. Here are a few of the world-class online strategies you can implement into your company’s digital marketing mix.

I am often asked why many of the social media profiles created are never visited or found by search engines. To get the most value from your social media activities you need to ensure that the profiles you create are easily found for the keywords that you are targeting. Here are a few basic steps to add to your digital marketing strategy that will get you results.

Keyword Placement

Place keywords in the important places of your profile or posting. If you are targeting a specific keyword on your website or blog to generate traffic, make sure these same keywords appear in your profile in areas such as titles, headlines, biographical paragraph, description of your business and past positions etc. If you use keywords consistently it allows you to control what searches you are likely to be found for.

Linking Strategy

Always make sure you are linking back to specific pages on your website, so include those links where it makes sense to do so. You should also try to make sure that the actual link page on your website or blog is very descriptive and contains the keywords you are targeting whether that is your name or relevant keywords. My LinkedIn profile contains my name as a part of the URL, and my profile contains many keywords that I wish to be found for http://ca.linkedin.com/in/wsibruceallen.

Remember that if you visit a prospect and they do a search on your name to get some background information once you have left them, you need to make sure they find excellent relevant content easily. This is where your profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and ecademy will be found.

Social media profiles offer more ways for potential customers to find you, so make sure you make the most of the opportunity.

Learn more about how to leverage your company’s social media profiles now.

Social bookmarking is great way to get more visitor traffic to your website or blog. Interested social bookmarking site visitors will discover your links and browse to your articles, website pages or blog posts.

Search engines will also discover your links found on popular social bookmarking websites as most of these Web 2.0 channels are ranked very high on the search engines. It is a great way to get your pages indexed on the search engines.

Social bookmarking can help you develop a regular flow of unique visitors to your website or blog over a period of time.

How does social bookmarking work?

Social bookmarking is a way of saving your favorite bookmarks to a public website and tagging them with relative keywords found in the content of the page you want to save.

Others can see your bookmarks and tags as you can see theirs. This allows people to organize, search and select bookmarks based on these tags. These can then be accessed from any web enabled computer.

People search social bookmarking sites to find the most popular websites dealing with almost any subject. Some of the popular social bookmarking websites features a ranking system where users can vote for your bookmarks.

To put it in simpler terms, if your site is rank highly by others, your links will become popular and viewed often.

Social bookmarking tips

• Register: This will be the first thing you will do when you find a social bookmarking site that you would like to use.
• Widgets: You can make it easy for other users to bookmark the content of your website and blog by adding social bookmarking buttons such as Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us or similar sites to your content. Visitors will then be able to bookmark your content with just one click.
• Participate: Search and find informative, great content that you can bookmark around the web. You will gain a reputation by only presenting the best content. Be social and social bookmarking will pay off.
• Great content: Always focus on creating content that is informative, unique and that inspire others. If your content doesn’t stand out, bookmarking won’t work. Valuable content is always the key.
• Occasionally bookmark: When you have created an outstanding content article, it is really ok to social bookmark it yourself. It should meet the standard you set for other or it will hurt your own credibility.

LinkedIn is a business network that has grown exponentially over the past few years and the reason for this is that it is an invaluable digital marketing tool for finding people who can help you to reach your goals. One of the main benefits of using LinkedIn is that it helps you to discover the relationships between people and the mutual contacts who can introduce you to other influential people. Also for people who run professional organizations or associations, LinkedIn will stimulate the dialogue and interaction between members thereby attracting more members.

Your LinkedIn Network

LinkedIn is a three degree network in as much as it only considers your first three degrees as your network. So people you know are the first degree, their connections are the second, and those that know them the third. This makes sense since the more degrees of separation the less personal the connection and the harder it is to reach them. If you want to reach people who are outside of this you should become a member of a group that they are a member of. You may then contact them directly, as long as they have not changed the standard privacy settings, which most do not.

Join LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups can also help you to raise your online visibility. If you think of online networking as being based on increased communication, then you should be taking part and sharing or giving information, asking for help and thanking others for help provided. This will increase your visibility and profile, as well as strengthen your relationships with those in your network.

So take some action and

• Answer questions in the Discussion forums and post relevant articles in the News section
• Ask for help and information from your network, make sure you have thought through the question and people will provide help and assistance to you, which helps to build relationships
• Thank people in public, in a current discussion or forum or start a new thread. Be specific and generous and you will be amazed at the results you will obtain.
• Provide a recommendation to someone who has provided a service or helped you in some manner.

So if you wish to use the network to find new customers, a new employee, supplier or partner, then LinkedIn can provide the information and connections to make that happen.

Join our network on LinkedIn for daily updates and some best-in-class industry tips for your company’s digital marketing strategy.

Thank you to everyone who was able to join us yesterday for this month’s free webinar “PR on a Shoe String.” Facilitated by one of WSI’s PR and Social Media experts, Tracy Spence, this special webinar tackled some best-in-class business strategies on how you can generate PR campaigns on a “shoe string” budget.

All attendees are sure to have benefited from Tracy’s industry expertise. Each one hour session was packed with the ins and outs of how you can develop simple – yet highly effective – public relations and social media strategies to generate publicity for your company. So, now there’s no way you can be left behind in the social media boom.

Tracy Spence has been with WSI since 2005 and has been instrumental in providing leading edge public relations strategies for her clients as well as for several business and digital marketing seminars, including one of WSI’s Global Conventions. What’s more, is that Tracy is a regular blogger right here for the WSI Digital Marketing blog, so everyone is sure to gain continual tips and industry secrets on how the role of PR and social media can serve as profit-driving business solutions for your company.

And in remaining true to her character, Tracy has provided even more resources that will give you the knowledge to increase your brand and business online with a complimentary whitepaper “PR on a Shoe String: Online PR Using Social Media.”

All in all, this was another excellent edition in WSI’s Internet Marketing Expert Webinar Series. This is a year-round initiative from the WSI Franchisee Network, who work tirelessly to facilitate free webinars and complimentary whitepapers each month, covering topics that will prove to drive online sales and growth for your company. So, keep an eye out for an announcement of our next great webinar topic.

Click here to download your complimentary whitepaper: “PR on a Shoestring: Online PR using Social Media.”

A Facebook fan page is an essential part of online marketing. You can see some outstanding examples of how large brands use their pages in this list of the top 50 branded pages of 2010.

1. Use your personal profile for professional networking. Having a personal profile allows you to reach out and add select individuals as friends, comment on their walls, and begin to build key relationships. Plus, be mindful of your status updates and posts—you never know who’s reading your content in their stream!

2. Make use of Friend Lists. To better manage your friends, create lists with specific influentials, for example; you can then more easily view your News Feed each day and quickly Like and Comment as appropriate to continue nurturing those important relationships!

3. Use @ tags strategically. You can have up to six “@ tags” in any update/wall post (on your profile or fan page) consisting of a mix of friends, fan pages, events or groups. Use @ tags to give credit, thank, acknowledge and be enchanting!

4. Add an attractive landing tab to your fan page. A popular tab is a simple “welcome” message with custom graphics and possibly a video message. The purpose of this tab is to inspire visitors to join (like) your fan page. Check out these examples: NHL, EzineArticles, Steve Spangler, SocialMediaExaminer, and my own fan page.

5. Provide an area for your fans to promote themselves. To honor your fans and to help minimize any possible spam posts on your wall, give your fans their own forum using the Discussion tab. Specify exactly how and where you want them to post. For example, I have a long-running, popular thread encouraging fans to promote their Twitter accounts.

6. Respond to fans posts promptly and personally. Implement an effective engagement strategy (you may need team members to help) and reply to your fans’ comments and questions. Personalize your replies and use fans’ first names for an informal feel. BestBuy is an excellent example of enchanting engagement!

7. Surprise your fans and think outside the box. From time to time, give your Facebook fan page a burst of excitement by introducing initiatives like “Fan Page Friday” or “Share Your Blog Day” and invite all your fans to share their links on your wall. Every wall post creates viral visibility for your page throughout Facebook!

8. Give away a special free gift. Using the FBML app on your fan page, you can add any custom content as a tab or in the left column, including an opt-in box. Offer your fans a valuable, free download and you’ll grow your email list as a result. You can then continue building your relationship with your fans via email.

9. Chat live with your fans. Your fans will love to interact with you LIVE from time to time. Use the Vpype or Ustream apps to stream live video and get your fans to interact and chat. Also, try out the Clobby app (Chat Lobby) to chat real-time with your fans. Your fans will love you for the enchanting live element and you’ll stand out from others on Facebook!

10. Get your fans involved in product and content creation. Involve and include your Facebook fans when creating new products or when seeking ideas for new blog posts, etc. This is called “crowdsourcing.” You might also run a contest. Wildfireapp.com is a good choice for contests on Facebook.