By now, you have observed the phenomenon that is social media. Social media has surpassed Internet communication and has become an online resource all its own. Face Book now has over 300 million users, while LinkedIn has 55 million professionals networking around the world. You know of social media…now the question is: should you play social media manager and start your own social media campaign?

It is far too easy to say yes, and encourage new company owners to embark upon a half-hearted social media experiment, just so they can say they are part of the trend. However, creating a social media campaign requires investment not only in money but also in time. The only way you can justify social media expense is if you can observe the benefits and identify the purpose of your campaign.

Why Should a Business Use Social Media Websites?

Running a social media campaign is not just about setting up an account and filling out a profile. A social media manager is actively involved in a company’s online marketing and oversees status updates, features, profile information, links and numerous other details because it is all part of one important project.

What are the most obvious advantages of social media campaigning? Social media is a great opportunity to subtly build brand awareness and brand trust, to keep your customers updated as to new company news, to interact with your public, to promote goodwill, to find new leads and to survey a portion of your audience.

What company wouldn’t benefit in these areas? Social media is well worth the investment, provided the company can find a competent social media manager and devote the proper amount of time to running the page. A company that invests in social media shows itself to be attentive to its online audience, smart to new technology, and actively involved in cheap and easy advertising. In many cases, your prospective leads will be more interested in how you conduct yourself as a company in the public eye rather than with how you “sell” your website on a homepage.

The Proper Approach for a Social Media Manager

The person in charge of running your social media pages should have a strategy in mind as he or she begins setting up profiles and posting updates. Part of running a successful social media site involves avoiding the most obvious mistakes. Do not bother creating a social media profile or page if you haven’t the slightest idea what to say. Make an effort to separate your personal and professional pages, so that you can represent your brand with dignity.

A social media manager is wise to the beneficial effects that social media networking can bring. However, before starting a campaign it is wise to identify your marketing goals, not just online, but as a company moving forward into the new age. The only way to calculate return on time investment is to compare your goals and your company’s progress.

More than a few people have suggested that social media sites are like the “phone books” of the modern age. Social media is where people go to learn information and the first rule of business is that you must go where people go. How can you justify not showing your brand and establishing your name in such a crowded location?

You could take it even further by saying that social media marketing is like the fusion of a phone book listing and a television advertisement. The necessity of social media is obvious. Now you should ask: what are you as a social media manager willing to do to make your social media campaign successful?

“Social media is no longer a distraction from your job but part of your job. Companies go to great lengths to hire social media managers to keep the company culture strong. Find out why business needs social media!”

Photo by linkedmediagrp

Just a few years back, you would have been surprised with the mention of social media marketing. In today’s world, they are the buzz words. Initially social media was not meant for marketing but it went through a transition in which it was able to market various services and products.

This was plausible because social media is all about interaction. It gives us easy access to potential and existing customers and isn’t that what an entrepreneur desires? Moreover, social media is a cost-effective means to combine the aspects of both social interaction and technology.

Define Your Customer

So, lets say you are a small business and planning to use social media as a launching pad.  You successfully created your company’s Facebook page and your own Twitter Account, but then you ask what’s next? You need to have a well defined target market you can’t expect customers to flow right in. This is where it’s important to define your customers just like with any other form of marketing. Who is your ideal client?

Define A Focused Strategy

It’s imperative to have a focused strategy in place. Don’t expect social media to end all your marketing woes like a silver bullet. It’s a media that can work well with your other forms of  marketing strategies. Implement a few different social media strategies to grow your reputation online.

Use Social Media strengths to Your Advantage

The biggest strength of social media is being able to share which then gives you an opportunity to communicate with people around the word. Some organizations use this strength to their benefit by allowing a direct two-way communication between the organization and its customers. In most cases, we focus on keeping our  customers well informed about our products and services and how they may benefit them in the future. This two-way communication also involves feedback from customers which is priceless.

Social media is a great way to find your influential brand ambassadors, these ambassadors will then spread the word to potential customers about how great their experience was with your small business.  This is free word of mouth marketing! A referral from any customer is easier to work with then looking for new customers yourself.

photo credit: yanec

You will agree that in spite of some strange features, Facebook is still an addiction. Having crossed the benchmark of 500 million users from across the world, there is still no stopping. The number of users creeps in everyday and why it shouldn’t, Facebook provides some extraordinary features to keep its users glued to this particular social networking site.

One such feature of great acclaim these days is that of friendship pages. The friendship pages allow you to view conversations between your friends or find out how flirting between any two of your friends led to their marriage or how their fights led to breakup. All in all it’s allows you to see what your friends are posting on each others walls.

It’s not like your conversation leaks out in public, for viewing someone’s history, you must be friends. So for those scared of privacy issues, friendship pages don’t have this problem. For instance you met someone at a party via some mutual friend. And now you wish to know more about them. All you have to do is look through their history or wall posts to learn more about them.

It sounds creepy! But if it wasn’t everyone’s desire then why would Facebook stalking catch so much fame. Before Farmville became the major thing, going through your friends’ profile page, like buttons or status updates were the biggest pastimes. Friendship pages have given a new meaning to social interaction.

As for those who are not comfortable sharing their personal stuff with everyone including some friends then they can make use of standard disclaimer rules. Reset your privacy settings if you don’t want to become a part of the show.

So this in-depth glance at relationships can not proceed without mutual consent. What’s more interesting is the fact that now you are spared from a lot of Facebook browsing. Because previously, you would have had to sift through profiles to determine relationships between any two of your friends. However, now you don’t have to go through all that trouble.

With friendship pages, significant ease has been brought to browsing. All RSVPs, comments, events can be viewed from your wall. There hasn’t been a better way to remain updated with your friends’ activities.

For some users, friendship pages are the means to commemorate some cherish-able moments between friends, while there are some who take delight in pouring through insults or some long history comprising of snarks.

Though it appears creepy just be aware that people can see conversations you’ve had with friends. Just like some other features, friendship pages on Facebook have been a huge hit. The high user retention rate on this social network are tied to a human desire to stay in touch.

Building a business on any type of social media service takes a light touch and an experienced mindset. Unfortunately not everyone can boast having both of these attributes. If a small time businessman includes himself/herself in the equation than that usually turns out to be a recipe for disaster. No one can think of managing a social media business presence without the aid of relevant management skills. You can opt to hire a social media manager to do the job for you which helps lesson the learning curve and saves you tons of hours.

One thing you must understand is that hiring a social media manager is not the be all and end all of online business management. You can’t just pay one off, sit back and dream of the oodles of cash just waiting to be tipped into your bank account. Before even thinking of hiring one, it’s always best to learn the ropes of social media management yourself. So, how should you go about it?

Get to know the lay of the land

The first thing you must do is to map out the online terrain and get to know the lay of the land. In layman’s terms that means you have to familiarize yourself with the best social networking and bookmarking sites and direct a large portion of your activities there.

Choose your tools wisely

Keep tabs on your most frequently visited sites and choose the most suitable tools to make your social management easier to manage. You can do that by regularly posting your progress online. Take Twitter for instance. If you have an account on that social media network along with a large following you can automate your tweeting with tools which will aid you in updating regularly.

Strategy is Key

Every website needs regular maintenance to keep it afloat. The same applies to business sites which need more than usual tune ups. The key to doing this is through website traffic analyzers like Google analytics which will provide you with detailed reports regarding where your traffic is coming from as well as the most used or popular keyword searches to your site.

The geographical diversity and density of your users can also be found out through the use of these analyzers making. This continuous update will allow you to strategize your business website accordingly.

Importance of Market potential

Be sure to check out the popularity of any good websites and blogs. When you find them try and have your advertisement campaign displayed on it especially if it is related to your products or services.

Don’t be the Needle in the virtual Haystack

The World Wide Web has been perceived as a potential business venture by billions of users around the world. Making your presence known in this dense corporate jungle can prove to be the key to many successful business ventures world wide. It’s therefore essential that you make yourself as visible as you can amidst the immense cluster of other business websites.  You can do that by ensuring that you get listed in the top search results to help your enterprise.

We all know that Microblogging has become one important tool for promoting business activities. Over the years, since the inception of Twitter many businesses have taken advantage of the platform to expand their operations. For sure, Twitter today stands as one of the biggest and most useful social media platforms on the Web. Nearly every business that is being marketed online makes Twitter a targeted. However, unfortunately not every business succeeds. Why? Simply because even though Twitter is extremely easy to work with, it sure does have some norms that need to be considered before you can garner positive effects from it.

So, if you are a business owner and you want to learn how to exactly use Twitter to promote your small business then here are some tips for you:

Use a separate business profile:
If you run a small business and want to promote it through Twitter then you have two options; either use your personal account or use a special business account. The best way to go by is to use a separate business profile and promote it through your personal profile within your friends and connections. The reason for using a business profile is that other businesses will be able to connect to you easily. It is a trend on Twitter that businesses do follow other business profiles in order to expand their horizons. You can gain the benefit too from this technique!

Keep your Profile Updated:
Similar to your website and the way it works in Google, the same applies to your Twitter profile. If you want people to keep visiting your business website or else you need to update them with the current news. However, make sure you don’t create hype while selling. This is one of the biggest blunders people can commit while they are using social media for marketing their businesses. Remember, most of the people there are to connect with others and not to buy stuff so as soon as they spot the marketing lingo they would get in the refraining mode. What you need to do is to tweet in a manner which is friendly yet attractive to your followers.

Provide Feedback:
Once you start tweeting through your business account, your followers would show curiosity and ask you about stuff. One major mistake businesses do on Twitter is not to respond to their followers. The best way to keep your followers amused and engaged is to provide feedback to their queries. This way they will know that the profile is being run by an actual human being and not a bot.

Inspire your followers:
Do a little research on Google and see what profiles are most successful. You will come to know that people who have added a bit about themselves and how they found success with their business are the ones with the most followers. You can use the same technique too but make sure you are not overdoing it. It can be a major turn off for your followers if they see you are trying to be edgy.

Leave some tips that you’d like to share below.

photo credit: Naf : 4D

Guest Post by James Adams

Bloggers like to think that they are a completely different species of journalists. After all, very few bloggers had to earn or even apply for their positions. This means that they also tend to shy away from the use of traditional journalism techniques. Writing styles vary from blog to blog and even between posts. One thing that bloggers cannot afford to ignore is the power of a strongly developed headline.

For centuries, traditional journalists have worked to develop artful headlines that capture the attention of readers in just a few seconds, making them want to read the article that follows. In the age of the internet, the purpose of headlines hasn’t changed. It makes sense that regardless of the type of media, someone writing a journalistic piece would want to follow the techniques that are already proven to work.

Here are 5 headline writing Lessons from print media that every blogger should be considering in order to be successful.

1.) Keep Headlines Short:
Print journalists are required to use short headlines of ten words or less for most publications because there is a limited amount of space in which to print the headline. The internet is limitless, right? This doesn’t mean your headline should be.

Content consumers are used to traditional journalism and whether they realize it or not, they are looking for a style that is familiar whether they are reading blog posts or magazine articles. They make certain allowances for blog posts, but a long title will get you less attention than a short and concise one.

In addition to the length of the headline, consider the words that you are using as well. Small words stick in your readers mind. Active words stick out more than passive words. Choose your words carefully when crafting your next headline.

If you want to take a look at how you can write short headlines, consider the option of checking out Twitter. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, but there are some people who have mastered the art of getting their point across with even less than that.

2.) Write Headlines with Purpose:
If your headline is misleading or it does not give readers a true sense of what your post is about, they will make a note. When you write a headline, you should use it to tell readers how to react to the content they are about to read. Do you want them to learn something? Do you want them to take some action? You have the power to set their expectations before you write a single word of your post, just by using a short headline with a call to action.

3.) Use Numbers in Your Headlines:
The most effective tool in headline writing is using a number. Seeing a number in a headline will indicate to readers that what follows will be a list. A list means digestible content and it means quick reading. Read over your posts once you write them and see if you can get a number into your headline one way or another.

4.) Watch Magazine covers:
Magazine cover editors are masters at developing catchy headlines that grab the attention of millions of people every week. If these headlines didn’t catch people’s attention, the magazine would not sell nearly as many copies. Often, the actual title of the article will be different from the one on the cover, but the cover headline caught their attention enough to get them turning pages.

5.) Ask a Question:
The easiest way to get someone’s attention is to ask them a question. Just think about how you act in a conversation that is starting to lag. You ask a question of the other person and let the conversation build up based upon their answer. When you are writing a headline, keep this in mind. If you can raise an interesting question to your readers, they will look to your post for answers. Sometimes, they will answer the question and then read the blog post to figure out if there is another perspective they could consider.

Hopefully, these five ideas for crafting the perfect headline will get you thinking about how you can use them to grab your readers’ attention quickly and get them coming back for more. There are many blogs out there, and when you want to stand out among the rest, you have just a few seconds to get people to come to your site. Be provocative in your headlines and you will see that readers really cannot resist checking out what you have to say.

James writes about media and advertising on the CreativeCloud. For more of his writing, click here.

photo credit: roboxley

2010 has been one revolutionary year. We saw the rise of tablet computers, blu-ray, robotics, and so on. But, what we didn’t notice is that there have been noticeable changes in the trends of the World Wide Web as well. Till last year, Google was supposed to be the leader but today things have changed. It seems like social media websites like Facebook and Twitter have already declared war on Google and for sure there has been a tremendous change in the mindsets of online marketers. Think of it – there was a time when marketers completely concentrated on Google to promote their online businesses but now social media has become the number one preference.

Honestly speaking, that is actually a good thing because through social media people can now find potential customers more easily. There are numerous other advantages of social media as well and numerous changes that have occurred in 2010 which have made us think that social media websites are the next big thing. Here are some of those changes which have changed the way online businesses work:

Introduction of business apps and features:
Right from the start of 2010 we heard news pertaining to twitter, Facebook, and the others and their plans of making their platforms much more alluring for businesses. And, yes they all actually did it. Facebook introduced features like Q&A and business pages, Twitter announced a completely new user friendly layout and LinkedIn had its special feedback feature. All of them were basically targeted towards businesses and for their ease.

Communication made easier:
Why do you think all of these social media websites introduced features which made communication much easier than ever before? For instance, Facebook introduced the feature of joint strings. If 3 of your friends posted the same link you will get it as a thread instead of getting them separately. This way, not only your time is saved but all of your friends with the same interest on that particular topic can communicate about it. This is especially advantageous for businesses as they can get to know how exactly people feel about their brands.

Communicate with real people:
Possibly the biggest advantage of the revolution of social media is that businesses can really get to know who their customers are. Twitter introduced a feature some weeks back of having mini profiles. When you roll your mouse over to the person’s name, a short profile of the person will appear. This way, if you want to find potential customers you will know who exactly you are following or connecting with. Previously, this was not possible because Twitter showed you limited profiles.

Crowdsourcing is in!
Probably the major feature which was integrated by almost all social media websites is of Crowdsourcing. What we mean by Crowdsourcing is that most of the social media websites now have the feature of having open Q&A sessions in which numerous people can contribute and so on.

These were some major changes in social media which made the social media websites more lucrative for businesses.

photo credit: Marc_Smith

Some of us remember Foursquare as being a popular game at recess where four players would play ball inside of a larger square which was then divided into four smaller squares.  The object of the game was to keep the ball in play by bouncing the ball within the other players’ squares until eventually players were eliminated.

Today’s version of Foursquare has a much different meaning.  Foursquare is a social media application that is accessible by web and mobile phones it’s where users check in, letting their followers know where they are.  These updates can then be posted on your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Updates are also called “pings” when used on the popular iPhone application.

Foursquare is a fun application because it turns the simple check in process into a competition.  Users are able to earn badges and other accolades for checking in often and from different places.  In the fourth quarter of 2010 Foursquare recently added a feature that tells users how many days they are away from being appointed a “Mayor”.

Foursquare’s launch in 2009 was quite modest with a very limited usage area that included approximately 100 metropolitan areas.  They went on to upgrade their model in January 2010 that moved them into the worldwide usage arena.  Foursquare reports that there are over half a million users on their network as of March 2010.  Growth has been tremendous for the Foursquare network.

Web users can use Foursquare from the browser of their choosing.  For smart phone users there are applications available on the iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, BlackBerry and webOS systems.

The newest version of Foursquare was launched in September of 2010.  This version expands the application.  Instead of simply checking in, it also directs the user to new locations and also may introduce the user to some new activities.  This is especially fun if you are a tourist visiting an unknown area.  This is also a great tool if you are moving to a new neighborhood.

Foursquare is quite the upgrade from the local Yellow Pages.  Foursquare not only leads you to new places in a new city, state or neighborhood but it also offers some opinions and reviews of some of the natives.

There are several different badges that a user can earn on Foursquare.  There are badges that are pretty general; then there are ones that are specific to cities, events or even specific venues.  There is no clear guide on how to earn these badges.  Download the application and start checking in today and see how many accolades you can earn.

How many badges have you accomplished on Foursquare?

About Karriann

Karriann Graf is a Social Media Manager/Strategist for small businesses and real estate professionals. Her focus is to help you learn about the best Social Media methods to connect with your clients and customers and increase your revenue.

You started a small business and want to expand it, but don’t have much money to spend on your advertising needs. This really isn’t a problem because there are many ways to advertise your business using free options.

The Internet provides us with one of the best ways to use word of mouth advertising campaigns to different people throughout the world. Here are some of the ways you can use the ‘net for free advertising for your small business:

1. Use press releases to advertise your products and services. Press releases can be used to promote an event or to launch a new product. They’re an easy way to promote your company and you can submit them to several different directories online. Some allow you to post them free, while others have upgrade releases that cost a fraction of what traditional advertisements would cost.

2. Join message board forums. This seems like a small way to advertise, but it’s really not. Some boards allow you to provide a link to your website in your profile signatures. People who visit the forum are curious and will check out the link to see what it is that you’re offering.

They’ll pass on that information to other people they know who may be looking for what you have to offer. If you join message boards that nicely complement your company’s products, then you may be able to post on the forum letting everyone know what you have that they need and where they can get it. You’ll have to check the forum’s Terms of Service to see what’s allowed.

3. Start a blog – or even a podcast! If you market your blog or podcast well, people will return time and time again to see what’s new with your business. If you decide to create a blog keep it fresh by posting a new blog post a few times a week. They’ll send other people from their own blogs and pass on the links to their friends.

4. Use social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace. Some of these social sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to join groups with likeminded people with whom you can connect. You can easily position yourself as the “go-to” person in your niche, and post links to your site promoting your products and services. There are broad social networks, like Squidoo, that showcase topics on every inch of the spectrum, and niche-specific social sites like the one for eco-friendly enthusiasts or baby boomers.

5. Use article marketing. Providing articles on other sites that have links to your website can drive more traffic to your domain. Using keywords in the articles can help the search engines find them and funnel more customers through to your offer.

It’s not hard to find numerous free ways to promote your small business – even if it’s an offline venture that you own. Every business needs a home on the ‘net, and the Internet can help you develop a loyal following in any demographic.

What other ways have you advertised on a shoestring budget? Leave your comments below.

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About Karriann

Karriann Graf is a Social Media Manager/Strategist for small businesses and real estate professionals. Her focus is to help you learn about the best Social Media methods to connect with your clients and customers and increase your revenue.