05/14/12 by Guest Author | Blog, Facebook Marketing | No Comments »
Although the intention in the creation of Facebook wasn’t to create an advertiser’s paradise that was the end result nevertheless (even though there are still things to be improved in the advertising interface.) Things that are done to enhance the user’s experience, like the new Timeline feature, can end up beneficial for businesses that know how to harness the power of social media.
In other words, Facebook has the potential to turn your small business into a profitable, “larger” business if you only know how to navigate the field and stay updated with Facebook’s new releases.
Below, we will discuss four different methods by which you can turn your page into a legitimate marketing channel for your small business.
4 Essential Tips for Facebook Businesses Marketing
1: Limit Your Predictability
Because there are so many businesses and so many ads circulating around on Facebook, many users find a lot of ads and attempts to attract followers to be very predictable. Of course, you never want to stray too far away from any set formula (i.e. what the other guys are doing); but you also don’t want to be a clone of anyone else.
As more and more Facebook users are getting used to seeing ads since ads appear more frequently and even in the regular feed, chances are they develop ad blindness and totally disregard generic ads with stock-photos and only clichés in the copy.
Be unpredictable if you want to attract buzz.
2: Learn the Mechanics of Facebook
You’re going to need to invest some time to learn the mechanics of Facebook and how to properly set things up quickly and effectively. You will eventually need to change and adapt, and no matter what, your page needs to remain a friendly, welcoming place for your visitors.
Because Facebook looks so simplistic, a lot of businesses don’t put much effort into learning about the site. This is the wrong approach. You need to focus on the site’s mechanics.
There are tons of advertising opportunities on Facebook right now, from the traditional external-site marketplace ads where you drive traffic to your web shop to sponsored stories, which are more like a recommendation from a friend rather than traditional advertising.
Make sure you test different ad types to make sure you use the ones providing best ROI.
3: Save on Time and Money
Manually setting up ad campaigns and tweaking things as you go along is going to cost you a lot of time. And as anyone involved in business knows, time is money. They’re practically the same thing once you break down the dynamics.
So to save on time and money, you need to streamline everything you’re doing with a quality ad-based marketing program. Qwaya makes a great program for this. Their scheduling options, along with quick ad creation tools and tracking features, allow you to save time and to run a fluid campaign without it interfering with your other tasks.
4: Be an Authentic Presence
It’s very hard to trust a business that’s not coming across as authentic. If you appear to only be around Facebook for the traffic, you will quickly be sniffed out as a pretender. So remember that your marketing channel, meaning your Facebook business page, has to be organic. You need to want to be a presence on Facebook.
At the end of the day, you’re only going to get out of Facebook what you put in. It’s important that you focus on creating a quality marketing channel by learning about Facebook, streamlining the process, getting the proper ads, and maintaining your authenticity. If you can do those few things, you can be a big player in the genre.
Guest Author Craig Robinson is a content member and writer for Qwaya – Facebook marketing campaign tool. Besides writing for Qwaya and handling the media coordination, Craig takes interest in following digital marketing trends and studies about social engagement on the web. You can follow Craig on Twitter at @craig_qwaya.
05/04/12 by Sam | Blog, Social Networking Directory | No Comments »
Pinterest, a social networking site that allows users to organize and share things they find on the web in the form of images, is growing fast. It has nearly 20 million unique users, and over 80% of them are females. But it’s not just the females who are using Pinterest – businesses and brands are starting to use it too.
The reason is because many of the pins, or images, on Pinterest link to websites outside of Pinterest. For example, a pin of a piece of furniture might link to Ikea’s site. And whenever a Pinterest user “repins,” or shares, that pin, the repin will also link to Ikea’s site. As you might have already guessed, a pin has the potential to drive a lot of traffic to your website.
Here are a few ways to use Pinterest for marketing your business or brand:
Add pins and create boards
As a business owner, you want to share images that are interesting and still related to your business or industry. To add a pin, you simply select an image to upload from your computer. You’ll then be given the option to add a 500 character description and make that image link to a specific website.
An alternative to uploading an image is to type in an URL – Pinterest will automatically show you the images on that page and you can then pick one to create a pin with.
These pins are then organized into “boards,” which are categories of pictures. Boards look something like this:
Pinterest Boards
You can either use simple and popular board titles such as “Photography,” “Pets” or “Hair and Beauty.” Or you can use something else as the name of your boards.
There are a few specific characteristics you’ll need in these images, which we’ll discuss later.
Make it easy for people to share what’s on your site
To increase the likelihood of a visitor to your website sharing what’s on your site, add a social sharing bar or button similar to this one to your site:
A social sharing bar
The easier you make it, the more likely someone will share what is on your site. With a social sharing bar, someone can pin what’s on your site onto one of their Pinterest boards with two clicks and all of their followers will be able to see it. If you don’t know which social sharing bar to use, try AddThis.
Good content
A website with a social sharing bar alone is not enough. In order to effectively use Pinterest for business, you need good content, especially good images. Take a look at this screenshot of Pinterest:
A screenshot of Pinterest
All of the images in the screenshot share a few characteristics:
- Simple – there is one object that is the focal point of every pin.
- Beautiful – the images are artistic and tasteful.
- Inspirational -the pins create a sense of desire.
- High Quality – the images are clear and not pixelated.
Be sure that the images on your website share these qualities as well.
Integrate with your other social media accounts
You can link your Pinterest account to your Facebook and Twitter account. Once you do that, whenever you pin something to a board, it’ll be shared with your Facebook and Twitter followers. So even if they’re not on Pinterest, they will be able to see what you pinned to your board.
The purpose of this is, again, is not only to share an image, but to drive traffic to your website.
Hope you find these tips useful you as you start using Pinterest for marketing your business!
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04/16/12 by Alex Tran | Blog | No Comments »
Instagram is a cool free photo sharing service and app that works with Apple iOS and Android. It allows you to take photos that are reminiscent of Polaroid pictures with some unique lighting effect. You can share photos with friends on Instagram and post them to other social media sites. They boast of 15 million users and with its recent acquisition by Facebook, it’s expected those numbers will continue to grow.
The Instagram app is demonstrated below using an iPhone. Instagram Android works the same way.
Step 1: Download the App from your App store
Search for “Instagram” in the Apple or Android store and download it.
Step 2: Open Your App and Sign Up
When you first open the app, you’ll be invited to sign up for an account. Click “Okay” and then you can either sign up for an account or if you already have one, you can choose the “Login” option at the bottom of the screen.
To create your account, you need to add your email address, choose a username and add a password. You can also add your phone number and upload a picture of yourself. Just choose a photo from your device or take a new picture if you prefer. Click “Done” at the top right when you’re finished.
Step 2: Push Notifications or Not?
At this point, the app will ask you if you want push notifications. This means you’ll be notified whenever someone adds you as a friend, comments or likes one of your photos.
If you choose “OK” and then later want to turn it off or modify the specific settings, it’s easy to do. Just click the icon on the bottom right of the app that looks like this:
Then select “Edit Profile”.
At the bottom of this screen, you’ll see “Push Notifications”
Here you can choose which notifications you receive and who can send them to you.
Step 3: Find and Add Friends
Now you’ll be invited to find your friends and add them on Instagram.
You can search the contacts and your device and invite them personally. You can also see which of your Facebook and Twitter friends are on Instagram and start following them. And finally, you can simply search for someone to see if they are on Instagram.
Adding friends is optional and you can skip this for now, if you prefer. Instagram allows you to post your photos to Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, so you can come back and grow your friends list later if you’d rather.
Click “Next” in the top right corner when you’re done adding friends or if you want to skip this step.
If you’re not sure who to follow, you can select some people from Instagram’s popular user list:
Step 4: Start Taking Pictures
Now comes the fun part, taking and sharing pictures. You can do this by choosing the little camera icon at the bottom of the screen.
You can start taking photos as you normally would with your device or you can choose photos already on your device. To work with a photo on your device, click the photo icon on the bottom left of the screen that looks like this:
In our example, we’ve taken a photo and are going to work with that. When you take your picture, you’ll see you have a number of different lighting options. Here’s a screenshot below of most of those options.
Choose whichever one you’d like and you can click the green checkbox when you’re done. The app will save the picture onto your camera.
You can also add or remove the frame on your picture if you prefer by clicking the frame icon at the top left of the app screen.
You can also create a blurred effect with the drop icon at the top as well.
When you tap on the drop icon, you’ll see options on how the blur will appear on the photo. The round blur has been chosen below.
Now you can also add a caption to your photo and add your location, if you’d like.
Step 5: Photo Sharing
As mentioned earlier, you can share your photos on social media as well, but you need to configure your settings and give the Instagram app permission to do that.
Once you’ve configured the sites you want, you need to click the green “Share” button to send the photo to the sites you want.
We’re choosing to share on Facebook. Once we click “Share”, we add a description and then click the blue check mark to send it to Facebook.
The picture is then automatically added to Facebook, where your friends there can comment, like and share your photo too.
Step 6: Interacting on Instagram
Instagram also has useful interaction capabilities and there are always great photos to look at. You always have the option to “Like”, comment on or Tweet a photo that you see.
At the bottom of each photo, you’ll see “Like” and “Comment”. Just tap the like and it will show that you liked this photo. You can also go back and see all your likes later, so it’s like making a little collection of photos for yourself.
Commenting is pretty straightforward too. Just click the “Comment” icon as shown above. Then leave your message:
You’ll also notice another icon to the right of the comment option that looks like this:
This allows you to flag any inappropriate photo or Tweet it on Twitter.
Instagram is a fun tool for sharing your photos and helps you create some very attractive photos with your device, even if you’re not a great photographer. Get on and start sharing!
02/28/12 by Sam | Blog, Social Media Management | No Comments »
How are you supposed to keep track of everything said about you or your business when there are so many websites out there? In the social-media world alone, we have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and more recently, Pinterest, to name a few. On top of that, there are millions of blogs and news websites.
But first, what is social media monitoring or listening? Maria Ogneva, the Director of Social Media at Attensity, defines it as “the process of continuous and immediate discovery of conversations with the purpose of learning, engaging, helping and collaborating.” Social media listening is important for your business; we want to share the best social media monitoring tools to help you:
Google Blog Search – type in a keyword and Google will search through blogs for that keyword.
Google Alerts – after setting up an alert, you will be sent e-mails with updates of the latest Google results, including news, blogs and videos, related to the search query you set up.
Social Mention – search for keywords across multiple websites and platforms. This site also provides metrics such as strength, passion, sentiment and reach. They describe themselves as Google Alerts, but for social media.
Monitter – this site allows you monitor Twitter in real-time for any keyword or phrase you specify.
Twitter Advanced Search – this search tool from Twitter lets you search for tweets by keywords and narrow results by accounts and/or location.
Ice Rocket – type in a keyword to search for the latest posts on blogs, Twitter and Facebook.
Addict-o-matic – enter in a keyword or topic and the site will display some of the latest tweets, blogs, videos and news articles about that topic.
Paid options:
Trackur – start with a free plan or sign up for a paid plan which includes data such as how influential are the people who talk about you.
Radian6 – gives you to the ability to monitor real-time conversations happening around your brand, industry and competitors. It is one of the top tools available.
You can also visit this page for a master list of social media monitoring tools.
There are many social media monitoring tools available – use the one that best suits your needs. If you want to focus on Twitter, Monitter is probably a better option than Google Alerts. But if you want an overview of what people are saying across platforms, try Addict-o-matic or Social Mention instead. Of course, you can use a combination of these tools to monitor what people are saying.
What social media monitoring tools do you use?
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02/06/12 by Sam | Blog, Interns | No Comments »
We’ve all heard of the cliche about interns grabbing coffee and making photocopies. But an internship program can be so much more than just that. In fact, there are many internship benefits for employers. Here are a few:
Find future employees
An internship program is a great way to “test drive” potential employees. Instead of learning about a job candidate through his or her resume, a reference, or even an interview, you get to see them in action first-hand. As an employer, you get to see how the interns operate. You learn their strengths and weaknesses. You will find out if they can follow directions, work in a team, and do their jobs well. And you will know whether they fit into your company’s culture or not. Many large corporations hire full-time employees from their internship program for these reasons.
Low-cost
Interns don’t cost much in terms of money. You can offer unpaid internships in exchange for college credit (there are six legal criteria that must be satisfied in order for an internship to be unpaid). Even paid interns typically receive a lower wage than full-time employees. And you don’t have to offer medical coverage or retirement benefits to your interns.
Increased productivity
You can reduce your own workload and focus on the most important work by delegating certain tasks and projects to interns. And since interns are low-cost compared to employees, you have the ability to hire multiple interns at the same time. This means higher productivity, the ability to work on more projects, and ultimately, better results.
Interns are teachable
Many interns participate in an internship program for the experience and are eager to learn. Since many interns have little prior experience, they are willing learn your company’s system and way of doing things. Less experience can mean fewer bad habits for interns to “unlearn.”
Fresh perspectives
Interns grew up in a world far different from the one many of today’s employers grew up in. They see and understand the world differently. Even within a group of interns, each has his or her own unique set of experiences.This allows them share perspectives and ideas you may not have considered.
Understanding of technology and web 2.0
Although they might not have much professional experience, interns do have an understanding of technology and web 2.0. Today’s college students grew up using Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and MySpace (back when it was more popular). They connect with others through the web on a daily basis. Many also have technical skills in photo or video editing, web design, or programming.
You can create an internship program that will leverage the technological skills your interns already have. For example, an internship focused on social-media can greatly benefit your business.
Conclusion
Regardless of the size of your business or company, having an internship program can be advantageous to your success. It might take a little bit of time to train interns, but ultimately, the benefits far outweigh the cost.
If you would like to learn more, please read AD Publishing’s white paper on how to create a win-win internship program [pdf].
01/11/12 by Rachel | Blog, Brand Marketing, Social Media Management | No Comments »
When you are not listening, you are not learning; and learning or monitoring what costumers and competitors are saying about your business, service, or product is extremely important in defending your brand’s image.
Social media offers the ability for customers to have conversations and interact directly in discussing opinions about a brand’s service or product, may it be god or bad. Ideally, you find only positive messages about your brand everywhere! But rarely is that the case.
One negative message can spread like wildfire, especially in the hands of social media users where information spreads like a virus. You truly make your brand vulnerable to these negative messages if you do not serve as a source of defense and engage in online reputation management (ORM). Take the time to manage your brands reputation by listening, here is why:
1. Learn through research – researching the costumer feedback online, may it be good or bad, helps your business directly improve the services and products you provide. Social media provides information and saves you time in trying to get your customers to take surveys and fill out “how are we doing” cards. This is great a tool, so do some research, seek it out, and utilize it!
2. Crisis management – discover a potential communication crisis early on and work to engage in a marketing strategy to eliminate future damage or repair damage that has already been made. This is a great way to be proactive and act as your own online “virus protection.”
3. Protect your brand’s image – Engage in your own PR by defending your brand and presenting a positive image. If you listen to what others are saying, you can work to counter act the negative messages.
You heard it here; the best way to engage in online reputation management is by listening and monitoring what customers and competitors are saying about your brand. Now be proactive, and go listen to what others are saying about your business!
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01/09/12 by Rachel | Blog, Brand Marketing, Social Media Management | No Comments »
Is social media strictly for the use of business promotion… No! Non-profit organizations utilize social media for community engagement to obtain support from potential sponsors. They do this by primarily bringing awareness to their cause in order to gain support. There are a number of reasons why non-profits to go about employing social media tools in order to better connect to the community.
Here are 3 reasons why:
1. Reinforce strong relationships – Non-profits use social media to establish and reinforce fundamental relationships with its sponsors. Before the booming use of social media, this was carried out through telephone calls, sending regular newsletters, or sending cards; all to provide updated information and strengthen the relationship among the non-profit and supporter. Social media, since it is much more rapid then outdated means of communication, works great to keep in touch with supporters in a more consistent fashion and at a greater rate; allowing for more outreach, more often.
2. Location Based technologies – Some of the newer emerging technology in social media incorporates attention to the location of a social media user. This is extremely helpful when non-profits coordinate charity events or fundraising events; it brings exponential awareness and support. It’s cheap and easy advertising! Which is a double bonus, since fundraising is the foundation to any non-profit organization’s success.
3. Online videos bring awareness and credibility – A lot of small businesses use online video, through YouTube or Facebook, to get their name out there. Can non-profits use the same method to their advantage? Definitely! Videos have the capability of spreading like wildfire. Think about it, if you create a video and tag people, then those people see the video along with any of their friends or followers. Plus, people love to be featured! So, get them on camera saying why they love your organization and how people can support your cause, or people sharing their successes with the organization. It’s a great way to bring awareness and establish a desired image to the public.
So there you have it, social media use can be just as be beneficial to non-profits as to businesses.
The latest issue of Webdify Magazine is finally out! This website magazine is your monthly source for WEB, SOCIAL, and MOBILE news. Get your copy now!
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